Christianity is very interesting to study

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I know where it comes from-----from Indo-European peoples who migrated to the Indian Subcontinent, from the region where Iran is presently located, approximately 4,000 years ago.

The Nazis, obviously, had a distorted view of what an Aryan was....

And, by the same token, the British and American Imperialists had a very distorted view of what an Anglo Saxon was, too.

I think the Bible is one of the most interesting books every written, in the same way that Kim Jong Il's book on film studies is interesting. Chapter One and Chapter Two telling the same story in completely different ways is a very bold stylistic choice. The genre shifts are great. There's that bit in the middle of the Old Testament where it suddenly becomes very literary and we get great and weird books like Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, and Job (which is such a bizarre story). There's a musical interlude (Psalms). Then at the start of the New Testament, we hear the same story told three times, each one adding slightly more detail while following almost exactly the same beats, and then we hear the same story from a completely weird and often contradictory perspective. I don't find the letters particularly interesting at face value but I've had scholars point out interesting little snippets to me - regardless, it's a weird change of pace to go from the Testaments to a random assortment of letters! And the main letter-writer isn't even a character who met Jesus! And a bunch of the letters written in his name probably weren't written by him!

Bit of a ramble there, and I haven't even really gone into the meta-commentary (largely because I don't think I'd do it justice), but if you take a step back and look at the book in isolation without considering the historical factors that put it together, then it's a really weird piece of literature up there with Finnegan's Wake. Even if you do understand it then it's still a weird piece of literature... or, well, perhaps better understood as quite a weird collection of literature containing one or two very weird pieces.

I'm detecting sarcasm, but just in case:

It isn't meant to be read back to front Walrus, it's a collection of many different writings. The word Bible itself was derived from earlier names meaning the Books, plural, or Library.

I suppose it's valid to criticise the librarian for their organizational choices, yet somehow I doubt you would walk into a real library and wonder out loud why the shelves containing music and poetry and the shelves containing history and political correspondence are so close together. Surely what matters more is someone has gone to the trouble of building a library...

The Bible is a fine compendium of many genres of literature and (attempts) at history.

I've read a little bit of it; there's a side of me that wants to study it more thoroughly.

Also, a very important text of our culture.

I both knew that and I wasn't being sarcastic I genuinely think it's quite wonderful that rather than just a few history books, some law books, a bit of prophecy and some guides to prayer, the Bible contains all these weird and wonderful books, assorted letters, erotica, comedy, and poetry, that people who aren't familiar with it might not realise are there.

Have any of you ever read Why The Holocaust Happened by Eric Zuesse?

Who is Eric Zuesse?

Glad you asked. He is an investigative historian, who, changed my worldview forever!

"Investigative historian"?

I never got the feeling Jews were linked to Christians, in any way. I did get the feeling that Christians linked themselves to Jews. It was also always my understanding that although God's chosen people, the Jew's role in the unfolding of prophecy in the Christian faith was precisely never to believe. Nothing seems odd, or off to me about any of it. It is as it is supposed to be according to Christianity.

Jews are linked to Christians what has been written in the Old Testament. So are Muslims.

They are all derived from the Abrahamic, Yahweh faith of the Israelites. All three are just that which branched from off each other.

Like Jung and Adler branched off from Freud. All are still considered psychoanalysts, though.

On close examination they're all paganism all the way down but with the new testament it's a bit more obvious. The Gospel of John is loaded with Neoplatonism and emanationist concepts which seem to fly in the face of the idea that we're of some separate substance that's disposable based on merits of conduct.

An interesting study of it's own - if you haven't checked this out look up where the seven-day week started. It's a good launch point to see just how much impact the Babylonian beliefs and the captivity forged Judaism not just from the astrotheology perspective but also the astronomic timing of Jewish holidays and you'll see a lot of these concepts then collapsed against and mixed with an assortment of Zoroastrian concepts that seem to help fuel the henotheism. I don't know where historians are with the hypothesis that a lot of Judaism amounts to Cyrus the Great and Ezra but it seems like there's a high possibility for this to have been a sort of 5th century BC shot at nation building by a foreign power before neoconservatism/neoliberalism were the objective.


Yes, it seems like an overt hijacking of the narrative by Hellenistic ideas.


It seems like the Greeks had a lot of these ideas rattling around even before the silk road could have brought these ideas directly from the east. There seems to have been a lot of talk about how much the Greeks picked from declining Egyptian culture, Pythagoras was said to have spent quite a while in Egypt learning what he taught to his students (mixed with his own ideas I'm sure), and then comes Alexandria Egypt under the Ptolemaic dynasties in which Alexandria was a hot-bed for esoteric and occult philosophy. Particularly it seems like a lot of the core ideas for Kabbalah came from here (it wouldn't be codified as we see it today until the 15th century but you had the Sefir Yetzirah in the 2nd century which hits most of the basics), ie. some wedding of the source material for Pythagoras's tetractys with concepts from the Torah.

Another topic that's of a lot of importance to do some digging on is Hermetic philosophy of this era, ie. what it was long before it hit the Di Medici's and helped craft the European Renaissance, because it seems to be one of the more important missing links between various concepts that seem to just float around out there these days as if they were completely detached with no historical understanding of their common origins or cross-pollination. In particular reading the Corpus Hermeticum you see a lot that rhymes with the new testament. Chronologically one could say it's first or second century AD but you can see how various formulations of very similar ideas that sculpted the general flavor of Christianity abounded.


And the Freemasons were the first humanist movement significant enough to be able to shift the landscape in a direction away from theocracy and monarchy, ie. the nerd-herd of the 18th century where contrarians and renegades went to share ideas far more irreverently than they could in other venues without getting imprisoned or executed.

Some say, Jesus Christ was a Buddhist monk. Still, Christianity owes at least as much to Greek and Roman philosophy as it ever did to Judaism. This is particularly true of Roman Catholicism.

The main source, of course, of the entire Ideological Worldview, of the National Socialists of Germany, was Christian anti-Judaism. Still, one cannot completely leave Charles Darwin off the hook either. Did any of you ever read his book, The Descent of Man? That was his book about Human Evolution, and contains many of the racist attitudes held by Charles Darwin!