Thoughts on Christianity and Sun God Worship?

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What are your thoughts of christianity mimicking the religion of the sun god Horus, In my opinion christianity is outdated to still believe, just like Horus the sun god, Horus was born december25th and was born from the virgin icies, sound familiar? it all keys in so many religions and so many similiarities, theres so much more then that both those are the most looked on, Do you think its all about money? your twenty dollars you donate to the church goes to the preachers new car, think out of the box. I respect christians as all of my family are heavyily catholic worshippers...but have they ever looked on the outisde?

I think too much is made of Jesus just being another "sun god." Jesus was never born on December 25. That date was just assigned to the celebration of his birth firstly out of ignorance of his actual birth date, and secondly because that date was associated with the winter solstice, and so had had a great meaning to believers and non-believers alike in the ancient world.
As for church donations being misused by unscrupulous clergymen - that unfortunately is very true in certain churches, especially among modern day evangelicals who are short on actual doctrine and theology, but long on so called experience, emphases on God's favor expressed through material wealth, and the presiding theologian's cult of personality. Also, the same could be said about Medieval and Renaissance/Reformation era Catholicism, which had been able to fleece their flock after wielding secular power for centuries, and before Protestantism had offered an alternative in part out of outrage for church abuse. But it would definitely be a mistake to accuse all churches of such misconduct, especially mainline denominations that have oversight of finances from the top at church headquarters, right down to the congregational level.

I think there's elements of a real person who lived in Judea and studied to be a rabbi in a temple somewhere, led a small rebellion, was executed for treason and his legend got mixed in with sun god mythology.

The December 25th birthday celebration is a later addition and has nothing to do with the Jews who invented Christianity. It's not in the bible. I think it's possible that Jesus was invented and based entirely on other myths but it's not the most likely explanation at the moment. Not that there is a lot of evidence as no one says a word about him until long after he's reportedly dead. But apocalyptic preachers were a feature of the region so I don't see a need to create him.

But they did use story elements that were floating around. Most of the deep time Jewish mythology is very clearly taken from other near eastern myths. Myths created by older and more advanced civilizations. The initial deep water, god fighting a massive sea dragon, the dividing of the water, the flat earth, the magical fruit that confers life, the flood and the ark, and other stuff like that. And most of the things Jesus does had been done before in other myths, even reportedly done by another during his lifetime.

All modern day religions stem from older belief systems concerning the sun, moon, stars, and planets. They have just got more elaborate over the years.

There is no evidence that Jesus was a living person so I think there is much credibility in the idea his birth story is a retelling of the original 'sun' story. The roman's celebrated 25th as Sol Invictus (which means 'unconquered sun') because it was the day the winter solstice had come and gone and so the sun would return and bring light and warmth and feed everyone for another year.

Those who believe in jesus as a man have been fooled.

How do you explain the Roman accounts of persecution of the early church, then? If Jesus was just another sun god - tied in fact to pagan Roman religion - why make his worship illegal?

The biblical metaphors suggesting it are quite strong, most loudly the bit about the 'Sun of Righteousness' in Malachi 4.

OP: If you read MP Hall's Secret Teachings of All the Ages he does a pretty decent job of looking into the eclecticism that is the Judao-Christian belief system. When you go back also and look at Hermetic writings or Platonist/Neoplatonist texts you can't read John the way you're supposed to see it anymore - ie. Christ starts looking more like an expression of an element of the superconscious fully landed, the way he explains himself as a true vine seems to strongly suggest a Platonist/Neoplatonist structure, and it goes on as well in tellings of likeness between himself and the Father, ie. the Gospel of John seems to treat the identity of human beings as all connected to the same source or the rewelding of the people of the church to Christ as his body - it hardly gets more Platonic or Hermetic. When you do the research there's a name for rejoining God or attempting to remove all barriers (some would argue over the course of many incarnations) - it's more commonly known as the 'Great Work'.

I would fully agree with the OP on this in particular: to not read about the religious cultures surrounding those who wrote the Old Testament makes it impossible to have in context and when one then decides to call all pagan literature 'satanic' and strongly discourages people from even considering it's contents it really seems like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy et. al. not to pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.

I don't think the concept of Christ as solar logos unravels the validity of Christianity however, just that I clearly wouldn't have much to do with the present fundamentalist denominational outlooks because they have a frighteningly sloppy way of jamming an ancient book through a 20th century lens.

There is no direct evidence that Jesus lived, true. But the arguments made are that Paul claims to have met his brother. Which is ok if you trust Paul and the guys he met with. Another argument is some form of the criterion of embarrassment. Why invent a messiah, who was expected, who would fail spectacularly almost immediately? So it's that kind of reasoning that leads people to accept that it was based on a real account of some sort.

I think the arguments aren't all that strong. I don't know Paul and he's trying to establish his bona fides as an apostle in other places. He has a motive to connect himself with the first set of players. Secondly, if you want to manufacture a messiah you've also got to get rid of him. People can see he is not ruling in Jerusalem. On the one hand, that's a nasty way to get rid of him for story purposes. OTOH Christians claim, and Jews deny, that it was obvious that the Messiah would suffer and claim the OT predicted it. If they could read that into the OT, so could someone else. Claiming "no one could have predicted"...and then pointing out the predictions, is kind of weak.

Anyway, without more evidence it's just easier for me to accept that a guy like that existed and that a religion was built on top of his corpse.

Te whole Jesus linked to Sun God worship is based on very poor scholarship (if it could even be called scholarship). Aside from a possible exception of Robert Price, no relevant expert (even outside of the Christian circle) accepts this as true. Even Richard Carrier, a mythicist, rejects it.

Anyway, to simon_says, about the notion that the Messiah needed to be get rid of in some way anyway, true. But that's why they should've just made up the story of how he ascended to heaven, promising he'd come back eventually to actually save the Jews ... without the humiliation of being crucified by the Romans. And yet, we have accounts of him going through that humiliation indeed.

This makes more sense with a historical Jesus than with a mythicist one.

Right. But today Christians claim that the OT was clear about a suffering Messiah. I don't know when that argument started in Christian circles though but I assume it was long after Paul's time. I'm pretty sure the Jews don't agree with them but if the interpretations are at all sane, someone else could have read that as well. Though there are lots of ways to make a character suffer without crucifying him.

Anyway, it's an interesting idea but it's all speculation in the face of a simpler solution.

Sounds like an interpretation after the fact. Their Messiah ended up failing by being crucified, so they had to find some passage in the OT that would somehow support that the Messiah was supposed to fail at first. And they managed to come up with one or two. To the disagreement of the Jews of course.

I agree with that. But Christians won't. I guess i'm just pointing out that it's an argument Christians shouldn't make against the mythicists. They have others.

Most of today's Christians are as ignorant of the OT messianic prophesies as the writers of the gospels were. None of the gospels were written by the men whose names are on them. All of them were written by Gentiles, in Greek, and even Matthew, considered to be the most Hebraic of them and which was written with the theme that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Law and the prophecies, contains many erroneous references to OT scripture. For example. Except for one passage in Micah, there is nothing in any prophetic book about the Messiah being born in Bethlehem.

Right. I'm familiar with some of that. I'm in no way arguing that Christianity is accurate. My primary point is just that there are arguments that scholars can make for Jesus that popes should not.

My other point was simply that if you generate a messiah you've got to generate his exit. And if Christians today could in retrospect assemble a suffering messiah from the OT text, maybe someone could do so before the fact. I think it's quite a stretch because I agree that Christians read the OT in hindsight to see what they want and that makes for easier work. But is it possible that imaginative people could see the same face in the same toast? It's all quite a stretch, no question. And it's not my actual view of Jesus.

For the Romans, a political power play would require simultaneous religious maneuvering, since the allegiance of the gods to your cause was seen as an instrumental part of the process.

The more I read about the Cult of Mithras, the more I find odd about it. Its members were primarily high ranking soldiers, and it was a pastiche of religions that soldiers had encountered throughout the empire. Most notably Zoroastrianism (Persia). The Mithraic bas reliefs undergo an evolution, but the constants are Mithras cutting the throat of a white bull.

If you know your mythology, the white bull was a form taken by Zeus. So here we have a cult whose sacred imagery depicts a persian god cutting the throat of the father of the roman gods; the chief of the roman state religion. It does not take a genius to figure out this cults likely intentions.

The following is conjecture. I think the bas reliefs could be a record of the way this cult tried to take over the empire, a statement of intention, and a blueprint. They had levels of initiation, as most cults tend to have, nothing strange there, but it would have been a good way to test the conviction and loyalty of your initiates while they were planning treason. My idea is once you pass a certain rank in the cult of Mithras, they tell you what the cult is really about, and you start working with them to topple the emperor. At lower ranks, you're a zealot, and you're following orders.

I wonder if Christianity was the final stage of the Mithras cults strategy for domination.

I know I haven't explained this well, but I am tired

Part of the challenge with identifying the correlations is that most people don't realize how sort of high/cerebral sun worship was nor how the ancients saw the sun in their cosmology and how involved their philosophies became around that focal point. When you think of all living things on earth drawing from it for sustenance either directly or by heritage you then add the concepts of different layers of reality of being aside from the physical as what they'd consider, in whatever language, to the astral, the causal, the spiritual. I don't know exactly how they had those layers broken out but 'as above so below' were a big deal, it's part of why you have such a study of math and number in the Greco-Egyptian mysteries. They believed then not only in the physical sun as provider of life as we think of it in the modern scientific sense but also they'd consider there being the 'spiritual sun' which would be the provider of spirit for all living things.

The other thing that makes the conclusion challenging to draw of course is just how many times Judaism condemns anything outside of itself whether it's Joshua and the Canaanites (albeit their language became the Hebrew language) or the Lord showing the crimes of the priests of the Levites in his vision of the desecrated temple, the woman weeping to Tamuz (and yes - there's a month of Tamuz), or the twenty five priests saluting the sun. They did a lot of things that made the concept of Judaisms sources seem quite ironic against a literal read but in so many ways when cross-comparing things like arc building, the ten commandments, or even who had a completed 12 signs of the zodiac or a seven day week (Babylonians for the later two - well past the dates of the Genesis narrative, and Egyptian for the first two), it seems like these are things appropriated below the surface but are embedded in our mythology. You have the Menorah being seven branched, seven continually being repeated for the seven proposed 'planets' of that time. I could go on about the 12's and 7's all over the Torah/Pentateuch but similarly it's questionable whether Moses would have been writing in Canaanite before the Israelites encountered the Canaanites (hence it was probably the Pseudepigrapha of Moses), and if the claim was that the Chaldeans and Canaanites were the same people (the narrative in the book of Judith seems to claim Chaldean history of Abraham) I'd think more would be said regarding the grief of genocide against their own population if Yahweh had indeed asked such a thing.

Giordano Bruno of course got burned at the stake, not for so much agreeing with Copernicus as well as stating something to the effect that the sun was God (I'm not sure if he said the sun was Christ or the All - the later would be tough to fathom though being that Bruno believed the stars to be other solar systems). The ironic thing is just how much solar symbolism there are in the implements of Catholicism. A lot of what one could consider re-discovery was going on between the middle ages and the late renaissance.

I guess what I'm trying to get at - watching a few modern archaeologists run around the holy land will really only help so much for anyone who hasn't looked deeply into the mythological politics of the times and region, I think that's the only way the likenesses lift above the camouflage. I'm not claiming to be a PhD or to be more expert than the experts, just that I'd argue the evidence seems compelling even if it tends to be much more in usages of symbolism (something we're mostly utterly familiar with in the west these days) than in connecting archaeological dots or textual authors. It's at a different layer of examination than the carbon-dating texts game.