Other religions aware of Judeo-Christian deity?

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10 Jan 2009, 7:49 am

Victor Hugo is one of their Three Saints?

Victor Hugo, as in the author of Les Miserables and Hunchback of Notre Dame?

How did a French novelist get into Caodaiism's mythology?

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10 Jan 2009, 8:09 am

slowmutant wrote:

Victor Hugo is one of their Three Saints?

Victor Hugo, as in the author of Les Miserables and Hunchback of Notre Dame?

How did a French novelist get into Caodaiism's mythology?

Divine revelation? I think it is good that they do not think all holy people are from the place the founders happen to live.

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10 Jan 2009, 8:49 am

LostInEmulation wrote:

slowmutant wrote:

Victor Hugo is one of their Three Saints?

Victor Hugo, as in the author of Les Miserables and Hunchback of Notre Dame?

How did a French novelist get into Caodaiism's mythology?

Divine revelation? I think it is good that they do not think all holy people are from the place the founders happen to live.

I agree, but it's weird. It seems so random.

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10 Jan 2009, 7:45 pm

LostInEmulation wrote:

Caodaiism believes in God and Jesus but the Tao as well. They are an interesting religion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Dai

The eye on this religious art looks very modern to me... seems strangely out of place in the middle of the rest of this ornate and older-looking work... it's like gluing a photograph onto the face of the statue of David.

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10 Jan 2009, 10:37 pm

merrymadscientist wrote:

I think a deity (or deities) naturally have to have certain atributes to fulfil the human need.

3) Must provide some sort of life after death - most of us don't want to non exist after death (although personally I'm quite happy about it (now)).

In a polytheistic religion, obviously not all deities can be the creator of all.

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11 Jan 2009, 12:44 am

cao dai? now there's a religion I hadn't heard of in a long time. Strangely enough, from Robert Heinlein's books...

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11 Jan 2009, 8:38 am

Sci Fi writers hate religion, don't they?

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11 Jan 2009, 9:55 am

some do, others don't. Accelerando has different reactions to new technology in the Islamic religion as one of the plotpoints. And the religious characters are not described as bad.

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11 Jan 2009, 7:20 pm

slowmutant wrote:

Sci Fi writers hate religion, don't they?

Orson Scott Card won a Nebula award in 95 and a Hugo award in 96 for the novel Ender's Game. He's Mormon, which features very passively in Ender's Game. It's mentioned that Ender's father is Mormon (his mother is Catholic). His subsequent novels have been much more thickly inundated with Mormon ideas, which is one of the reasons I haven't really read his other works. I tried to read Speaker For the Dead (which won the same 2 awards) once and had a really tough time getting into it and gave up after a couple chapters. So needless to say I never got to Xenocide. My ex read I think the Homecoming Saga and told me about some of the elements of the story -- and I basically had flashbacks to Sunday school at my mom's church.

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12 Jan 2009, 11:08 am

Chibi_Neko wrote:

Whoa...

Chibi_Neko wrote:

After the brain completes death... then you are d.e.a.d
Lets say your soul floats off to heaven or whatever, you are still dead.

No... Your three-dimensional parts are dead. The real you is still alive, and will always be.

Chibi_Neko wrote:

Even religion says that everyone dies and that it is the soul that live on.

You're taking a common religious semantic which clearly refers to one's body, and applying it to the entire individual.
If you car gets totaled, that doesn't mean you, ergo, are dead.
Likewise, your body and physical brain comprise merely your Earth vehicle, so to speak.
They aren't needed for absolute existence, and they're not an essential part of who you are.
They're very familiar to you, naturally, but they're not you. Your spirit and soul are you.

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12 Jan 2009, 11:16 am

Ragtime wrote:

No... Your three-dimensional parts are dead. The real you is still alive, and will always be.

You say that as if you took a trip to the afterlife and came back to tell us how it went.

No one can know with absolute certainty that there are souls and that they live on after our bodies die. How is it that YOU would know?

slowmutant was able to admit that he doesn't know, the least you could do is admit the same.

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12 Jan 2009, 11:28 am

Ragtime wrote:

Can some faiths point to the same God without even knowing it?

Concerning this, the thread's main question, I think I first got curious about this question after reading in the Bible that Paul referred to a specific Greek god as Yahweh. Therefore, the Greeks worshipped the Jewish and Christian God, but knew only of His existence -- not even his name, let alone anything about Him. And indeed, God didn't even tell His name to Abraham. It wasn't all the way until Moses came along that God finally gave the Jews a name by which to call Him. And even that name ist merely a title of attributes in the Hebrew, so it may well not be God's actual name, if He even has one. (I mean, when you're the colossus which binds the entire universe, you don't really need a name. The reputation pretty much precedes you.)

And I've heard it said that it's interesting that, with all the many, many Greek gods and goddesses who each had specific assignments and specialties, there was still felt a need within the Greeks to also name an "Unknown" god -- the one who does everything else that the endless other gods and goddesses don't do. And Yahweh does fit the description of handling "everything else" -- indeed, of handling the whole of creation, from beginning to end, singlehandedly.

Acts 17:22-24: Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands."

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12 Jan 2009, 11:46 am

Chibi_Neko wrote:

Ragtime wrote:

No... Your three-dimensional parts are dead. The real you is still alive, and will always be.

You say that as if you took a trip to the afterlife and came back to tell us how it went.

Well, I believe it's true, if that's what you mean.

Chibi_Neko wrote:

No one can know with absolute certainty that there are souls and that they live on after our bodies die. How is it that YOU would know?

I can't, and I don't. I simply believe it.

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12 Jan 2009, 12:21 pm

There is nothing wrong with believing, but religious people need to know the difference between 'belief' and 'fact', such as you can 'believe' that the noah's ark story is true, but history and geological evidence proves otherwise.

The whole 'what happens after death' is a complete mystery and thus it is up to interpretation but we will never know until our time comes.

In a nutshell a line has to be drawn when you believe in a religion, and when you have to step into reality, this applies mostly to sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses, they believe that it is bad to have blood transfusions and brain-wash others to believe it.

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12 Jan 2009, 12:30 pm

Chibi_Neko wrote:

I agree that no worthwhile religion ignores facts. And I submit that the religious things I believe do not, and are instead based on facts. For example, God answers my prayers. That is an observable result that has been one of the greatest evidences that has convinced me that God is real. I can't argue with my own clear experiences of God and His intervention, and neither can anyone else. Of course, there are always probabilities involved when "observing" God doing something, i.e. "Could it have been just a coincidence?" But any sufficiently mature mind will test occurances based on the likelihood of them being merely coincidence or something more. And, in my life, those probabilities are extremely low. God very specifically, very timely answers my prayers, and often modifies the answers to greater goodness than I had originally conceived of to ask for.

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12 Jan 2009, 7:12 pm

Chibi_Neko wrote:

No one can know with absolute certainty that there are souls and that they live on after our bodies die. How is it that YOU would know?

When I think about it, the naturalistic concept of mind (soul) and body does not seem to conflict with few religious views on the issue, from my observation, Jehova's Witnesses (if I'm not mistaken) and Avdentists believe that when you die, you are done, no spirit, no ghost wondering around and hunting houses, not going to heaven or hell either, the belief is that they don't go anywhere. I learned when I used to go to church that the dead are "sleeping" until the second comming, which then, the dead will "wake up" to be judged. As I don't know anything about jewish dogma, I can't say what are their take about death and the afterlife.

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