A question for religious people

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Why do some of you insist on saying that you get your religion from the Bible, even when it is clear that you don't?

Look, I'm not saying this to deride your beliefs, but your beliefs are not even in the Bible. Anywhere. Your beliefs are pagan, and your rituals are pagan. You even celebrate a month-long holiday at the end of the year that was also celebrated for centuries in ancient Rome, and you don't pay enough attention to the Nativity scenes to even realize how little they are corroborated by scripture, not even the apocryphal Gospel of James.

The idea that your "soul leaves your body" is a pagan belief, and it is strongly associated with Olympianism, Hellenistic philosophy and Persian philosophy. There is literally nothing about that in the Bible. Period. The Bible, in every translation known to Mankind, suggests that your corpse will be reanimated when Jesus returns to make you part of his army of killer zombies, and you will supposedly get to live in his kingdom when he comes to rule the world. This is what it really says in there, and it's highly unlikely that this is actually in your beliefs.

The idea you have about God doesn't come from the Bible, period. It isn't in there. Look for it all you want to, but it's not in there. It's nowhere in there. The God in the Bible is not a compassionate guy. He is vengeful, and he comes across as white trash. According to the Bible, he ordered King David to kill off a whole race of people, and there is no clear reason why. It was just because God ordered him to.

If you are an ordinary American Christian, you probably think that God is this distant father figure who fills you with warm, cuddly feelings and makes sure that all the bad people who steal from you and pick on you and hurt people see that they are really in the wrong. Now, there is nothing wrong with that at all. I think it's a cute idea, but it's just not the Biblical god at all. I mean, you can look all you want, but it's just not in there. You want to know what color God's throne is according to the Bible? It's blue. He looks like glowing metal from the waist-up, and he looks like he's made of fire or something from the waist-down. If you are a Bible-believing Christian, any other image you have is wrong. It's spelt out right there in Ezekiel 1, which reads like a drug-induced hallucination.

And, if you think that there is a lot of talk about angels in the Bible and that there is one tooting a trumpet on every other page or something, you are off your rocker. No angels as you understand them. Period. Those images you have of pretty girls with wings come from an old Sumerian myth related to a fertility goddess, and the same myth somehow carried over into the Viking religion in the form of the Valkyries, and somehow it got crossed with Mercury, the Olympian messenger god with the winged boots. Again, there is nothing wrong with this belief! I think it's a cute idea, and it makes for good artwork. Go for it. However, you can look in the Bible until the cows come home, and you will find nothing that corroborates your beliefs on this subject, period.

Hey, I've got an idea. How about you make peace with the fact that you and your ancestors have always been pagan and you've preserved your pagan beliefs and rituals for thousands of years, in spite of every attempt to crush that culture, and be proud of that. You have a proud and noble heritage that goes back thousands of years. It just doesn't have anywhere near as much as you probably thought to do with the freaking Bible.

As far as I'm concerned, you can paint pictures of pretty girls with wings on them and naked men until the cows come home. However, I am a lot more inclined to believe in dancing satyrs and unicorns than I am to believe that ANY of your beliefs are anywhere to be found in that damn Bible.

Pagans played a role in our faiths if it wasn't for pagan belifes we would not have some of the religoins we have in the world. BTW we all ready knew about the pagan roots in our faith we stole their ideas and added our own to them.

I actually prefer to think of angels the way the Bible describes them: beautiful men who everyone wants to sleep with, and who used to come to Earth and impregnate women.
Mmmm....angels.

But you are descended from them! Your ancestors were all, practically without exception, pagans, and they didn't stop being pagans just because they had Christianity shoved down their throats. Their art, their music, days or months of the year that were important to them, are, to some extent, the same now as they were two thousand years ago. You are still following a lot of the old beliefs and traditions observed by your own ancestors. They passed on their traditions to you by, for generation after generation, teaching these traditions to their children.

Why do we hold on to these beliefs and traditions? Because we happen to like them! We like the idea that, on Samhain, we can take some time to honor and celebrate the dead and pretend for a while that they are there dancing and celebrating with us. We have done it for thousands of years, and it never gets old. It never gets old having a feast at around the time the cold weather starts to set in: the changing light and falling temperatures get us a little down, and having some close kin to eat with and cuddle with makes us feel better. It never gets old having a celebration and putting up a lot of lights and glamour near the darkest time of the year: it's good therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder, and it's fun anyway.

And finally, the whole idea of mind/body duality was invented by the Stoics. They believed that the universe is divided into active and passive elements, and they believed, by the same token, that the human body was divided into passive and active elements. The Stoics and Platonists actually had the idea of the immortal soul, not the Christians. The Christians eventually adopted it, though. Why? Because it's really a very attractive idea, that's why.

Therefore, I think it's really kind of silly that so many Christians, even though most of their beliefs have Pagan roots, go on pretending that their beliefs are based entirely and unequivocally on scripture, when scripture says something else entirely.

Anyway, there is no reasoning with people.

3 things come to mind:

Many denominations believe that the soul will rise up from the grave to heaven and only those that are martyred during the tribulation will come down from heaven with Jesus' army, and they will have a new body rather than a reanimated corpse.

Pagan origins for Christmas are well known. The birth of Jesus was used to replace a holiday dedicated to Saturn in order to encourage Christianity.

Trying to imagine some things in the Bible is futile and it's absurd to make any claims what some things really look like in detail and call it accurate. That can lead to superstitions and new, unsubstantiated doctrines.

Well I do not think I do get all my belfries form the bible but I come from a religion where traditions are meant to be as instructive as the bible itself we also believe the bible on its own has a tendance to be misunderstood and there for is limited if used as a sole source for belief

Well, Joker is Christian and he just admitted it.

Sometimes I think the Christians are actually the only living connection to the pagan past. Most of the pagan revivalists just built something new, a revival, out of things from books. It's not a living, unbroken tradition connected to that past, and there's no telling how accurate their interpretation really is. But the Christians have an unbroken connection to it, as obscured and misattributed as it may be.

The Pagans paved the way for Jews Muslims and Christians all we did was took some of their beliefs and repackeged it and made it our own by adding more it them.