My Hypothesis on Christian Roots.
Why Today's Christianity
is a Sham.
Dobbie's hypothesis:
The earliest form of Christianity was,
I hypothesize, a mystical cult. A form of Jewish mysticism, it stemmed from
interpretations of Old Testament scripture.
The cult also adopted philosophical
ideas of Plato, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the Persian religion of Zoroastranism
(God and Devil). Their various motifs included ideas that, the first-century cult
believed, would helped set the cultists free from the material world.
So-called Gnostic Christianity shows
some of the fusion; secret mystical knowledge, the gnostics believed, would help
set them free from the material world.
The earliest Christian cult promoted
a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit; special knowledge, the cultists believed,
came by courtesy of the Spirit. Today's Christians claim the same relationship;
in fact, they believe that the witness of the Holy Spirit helps set them free.
As time passed, the cultists thought
of Jesus as divine; he had been their most active proponent. The followers soon
believed that Jesus would favor them with immortality.
The Greek pagan religion already had
the god-man Dionysus who granted eternal life.
In the Christian cult, Jesus was
cast in the same role. Jesus had started out as only a teacher, but later
followers cast him as miracle worker and creator of the world.
A similar process of being cast as
divine is seen in the way some Christians pray to Mary; they make her an assistant
to Jesus. To them, she's practically at one with him.
The doctrine of heaven or hell went
along with accepting or rejecting Jesus respectively, an attempt to lend extra authority
to the Christian creed.
The New Testament presents a confusing
creed, however, where key points lack clarity. The apostle Paul rationalized
about it, he treated this problem with the line, "we see through a dark
glass."
The various New Testament authors spent
six decades putting the creed down in writing.
But Christians don't understand it
all, anyway. Their spokespersons try to clear it up, but their explanations are
often problematic and often show their limited grasp of the creed (such as it
is).
I say that gullibility played a major
role in the development of the Christian cult.
Watch the video that conveys similar
impressions:
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