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| "Where the heck is that reference to Egyptian mummies?" |
Richard Carrier´s latest contribution. Somewhat ironically, the discussion thread is (so far) more interesting than the blog post/essay itself. Extended quote of one of Carrier´s comments follows. Link to blog post further below!
>>>Buddhism is a kind of nature cult, in the way Taoism and Wicca and even Confucianism is (the latter focuses more on the “nature” of human society; Buddhism, on the “nature” of human conscious existence). It is therefore pre-built to accept and employ pre-cult and extra-cult discoveries, i.e. finding truths outside the religion is not a threat, since the religion is more like a science in that its goal is to find truths that already exist out there (threats can only come when external truths conflict with essential internal beliefs, which then depends on which sect of Buddhism we are talking about).
>>>However, Judeo-Christian-Islam-Mormonism (which is really just a bunch of sects of Judaism) is not a nature cult but a prophetic cult: it believes that a single royal deity has proclaimed all truths through inspired and thus authorized scriptures, and perhaps even (depending on sect) yet-continuing prophecy (e.g. Mormon Prophets are still a thing) or equivalent (e.g. the Pope is imagined to have a special line to God; and something akin is attributed to Protestant preachers “in the Holy Spirit”).
>>>That means any fact conflicting with prophecy/inspired authority is a problem. So, unlike Buddhism, which can claim a lost fact has always been a fact of nature waiting to be discovered, JCIM can’t say that, because God is supposed to have told them everything important, and he can’t have been wrong. He certainly can’t be a plagiarist. So, if the parable of Lazarus sounds suspiciously like a pagan Egyptian parable, that becomes a problem, because now Jesus is just creatively rewriting a merely human (and worse, demonic) story and passing it off as wisdom, which is hard to reconcile with a belief that he was The One and Only God whose wisdom is singular and unique and can’t have been invented by mere mortals, least of all demon-worshiping mortals.
>>>JCIM is thus far more susceptible to cognitive dissonance, and indeed becomes more and more so as the human knowledge-base increases—which is why science has posed such an obvious and corrosive effect on it, and thus why JCIM has had to divert so many resources to combatting or suppressing scientific knowledge or access to it.
>>>I also think this is why we are in an Age of Transition now from traditional religion (based on supernatural superstitions, e.g. a literal belief in demons) to political religion (a la Jordan Peterson). As I wrote before:
>>>I can’t prove it. But I do suspect—metaphorically speaking—that these guys are the id of an overly-ignorant public too overconfident even to see their own ignorance, much less recognize it as a problem they need to solve. These guys’ fans and worshipers are essentially the secular replacement for their predecessors, the Creationists and Fundamentalists. The mindset, the epistemology, the moral and existential panic, the rationalizing, the persecution complex, the outrage at being questioned or criticized, is all exactly the same. These are literally the same people…or would have been.
>>>Lately, ancient superstitions about devils and blood magic and angelic armies raining down from the sky have become an increasingly harder sell, so Creationism and Fundamentalism are declining. Those who would have been seduced by their cool-aide twenty years ago, are instead seduced by this new, more modern brew. This is where they went. And because it’s “secular,” atheists are being roped in by it, every bit as much as disaffected Christians are.
Good one!
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