The General Religion, Mythology, and Theology Thread

Believe it or not my mother swears she actually experienced snow on Boxing Day (December 26th) in Australia. Mind you this was in Lithgow, NSW which has weird weather at the best of time. But normally a "White" Christmas in Australia means that you've just been pummeled by a massive hailstorm. At least our culinary traditions have adapted. We might eat the same meats (though often replacing turkey with chicken) but it's served cold with side salads and lots of seafood.

Unfortunately it's really tough to avoid the whole "Christmas = snowflakes" thing. Most specifically Australian Christmas things I've ever been able to find tend to be hideously tacky, in the "Lol Australian culture is just beer and thongs and corrugated iron sheds amirite" way. There are a few nice dignified Australian carols out there, but not many.

Part of the dilemma is that if you cut out the winter imagery, and want to avoid piling the religious imagery on too thick because you aren't overly religious or don't want to push Christianity onto people... what is left? Just presents (and present related things like stockings or Santa) really, which is a bit sad.

edited 23rd Dec '17 5:50:21 AM by LoniJay

Actually turn it into a summer celebration. Midsummer is just as noteworthy. Sure, the story of Christ leans heavily on winter... But, "no room at the inn" with "emergency accommodation that's quite bellow par" is very much a summer thing, too.

edited 23rd Dec '17 5:53:19 AM by Euodiachloris

The celebration of Christmas itself may be old, but it's my impression that this poem is the historical origin of most of the Santa iconography that we now associate with the holiday.

@Loni Jay: The only religious imagery associated with Christmas is the nativity play, and it's not used that often, so I can't see not having it as a big deal.

And it's really not religious people who have stopped putting up Christian imagery out of "fear" of backlash, it's simply that the populace is becoming more secular and celebrative of the festivities of other cultures.

Finally got back to reading the Bible today, and ye Gods do the latter parts of Exodus get tedious as fuck. It basically becomes one giant-rule book at some point, and when we get back to the actual story, we get God and the Israelites both being dickwads for a change. The Israelites lose complete faith in God just because Moses is gone for a month and Aaron is somehow convinced to make a new 'God' for them out of gold, and God just wants to kill everyone for disobeying him. Moses manages to stop him, but he still ends up having some dudes kill a bunch of other dudes anyway. It's like it suddenly turned into full-blown Comedic Sociopathy, but without the Comedy. And yet it's still worth reading just to see how fucked up shit can get. Because, as per Bible tradition, things get very fucked up.

Speaking of Exodus, I wonder which Pharaoh was tormenting the Israelites? From what I learned from my Anthropology class back when I was in school, the Egyptians were quite advanced and actually treated their workers well.

Nobody knows. The entire episode is of dubious historicity.

edited 23rd Dec '17 11:49:12 PM by TerminusEst

You may occasionally hear Rameses II mentioned, but this is probably one of the most nonsensical options despite it somehow being ingrained in pop-culture. Mostly because Rameses II lived to ripe old age and left his successor a prosperous and powerful Egypt at the height of one it's golden ages including control over the Levant, the place the Israelites supposedly escaped to.

As Terminus said (at ), the historicity of the Event is dubious event and even assuming it is a later exaggeration of a smaller event it cannot be definitively located in history.

My theory is that the Hebrews really did live in Egypt for a while, but they weren’t horrifically treated slaves. (There’s a reference or two later on to “in Egypt we had meat every day” which doesn’t sound like badly treated slaves, even by the standards of the time.) There was some sort of falling out, the Hebrews left, and then proceeded to garble the hell out of it because no one would have written it down until centuries later and they wouldn’t have been in contact with anyone else who would know anything about it. There’s enough strange details (like Moses having a stutter. Like, why would you make that up?) that it’s likely that some of the figures involved actually existed to some degree or another. And we do know for sure that the Hebrews just kind of invaded Israel out of nowhere, since a couple of neutral groups at the time recorded that, so the group was somewhere else beforehand.

The later stories are likely to be more accurate, if only because other peoples were living in the area. Like, you want to know about something that involved the Philistines? Go ask the Phoenicians, they lived next door in Sidon and Tyre, and wrote everything down.

Bear in mind that, at the time, Yahweh was more of a tribal God, and the ethical standards of the day very much did not extend to the members of rival tribes.

Actually, we don't. Quite the opposite. For one thing the list of cities that they Israelites supposedly conquered have been uncovered and shown by archaeologists to have been destroyed over a period over several hundred years and at least in a couple of occasions to be victims of fires or earthquakes rather than external conquest and one of the ones that was conquered was shown to be the work of someone else (the Assyrians if I remember correctly).

Furthermore the earliest archaeological evidence for the proto-Hebrews/Israelites is in Canaan itself. This is generally taken by the lack of pig bones and teeth in middens (showing the prohibition of eating pork was fairly early development) and most of these settlements are in the rocky, less fertile highlands, but still within Canaan itself. The outsider/outcast narrative probably combines with that, including possibly some conflict with Egypt or their client states but not within the Nile valley, but their holdings in the Levant.

My College professor proposed that it was during a period where Egypt was conquered by an external power (whose name I can't recall), and the "Egyptians" it refers to were actually invaders with a Foreign Culture Fetish. According to this theory, this is why the Egyptians didn't have any records of the event, because it was actually someone else at the time doing all this.

edited 24th Dec '17 3:45:07 PM by Protagonist506

That might be referring to Nubia, specifically, King Piy. It doesn't work though. Piy conquered Egypt way later than any of the possible dates for the Exodus and before that point...well, Egypt was kind of random with the Pharaohs (a history dating back to 3500 BC will do that) and most of the history is the north and south basically fighting over who controlled the whole country. The religion also changed shape a ton of times because of this. Before King Piy, there aren't any wholesale invasion-and-takeovers recognized. And after King Piy, the 25th Dynasty had to fend off the Assyrians until they lost and Assyria ruled Egypt. The Assyrians eventually fell to Persia. All that happened after 728 BC, when the Israelites were definitely present in the Levant.

Yeah, I might be wrong about that. When you get that far back, things get fuzzy. There is some evidence of some group or another showing up, attacking a bunch of cities in the Jordan Rift Valley north of the Dead Sea and then moving inwards. Maybe that group assimilated with the Canaanites? Because the Canaanites absorbing groups and co-opting their histories and stories would actually explain some of the earlier stories.

It does kind of remind me of the Solomon thing. King Solomon might have existed but he couldn't possibly have been nearly as wealthy as the stories say. He (or whoever inspired him) may have been fabulously wealthy...by the standards of an incredibly poor country that was mostly left alone because it was next to a major trade route, but not directly on it. The Philistine city-states were probably wealthier because they had farmland that wasn't awful, and Sidon and Tyre were certainly much wealthier because they were important cities in the Phoenician trading empire.

(Seriously, the Land of Milk and Honey thing raises so many questions when you find out what the farmland was actually like in the traditional boundaries of Israel. That is, incredibly awful.)

edited 24th Dec '17 4:19:00 PM by Zendervai

Is it possible that a sub-Kingdom existed between Egypt proper and what the Israelites knew as the chosen land? And they simply existed within this sub-Kingdom for a time? If they were in an offshoot/tributary/neighbouring inspired Kingdom and not Egypt proper it might explain why there are no Egyptian records.

It's always been my entirely subjective impression that the old testement has about as much relationship with actual history as the legends of King Arthur.

That’s probably a good comparison, as I think historical data does indicate that Arthur existed, but instead of being the high-medieval era knight of French mythology he was a pre-Saxon Briton (with an o) who lead the Britons in the post-Rome era and battled against the invading Saxon Christians, with his historical descendants and people being the Welsh (and Cornish).

If you are interested in such things, "The Discovery of King Arthur" by Geoffrey Ashe is absolutely fascinating.

Actually I've heard a similar theory but the people identified were the Hyksos

Those are probably the ill-identified Sea Peoples. No one knows exactly who they are and have been and many theories have been put forth as to their identity. Though when it comes to linking them to groups from the Bible they're more likely to be identified with the Philistines than the Israelites.

The problem with all this hypothesising is that it occurs around the Late Bronze Age Collapse when records start getting... spotty at best. The Mycenaean Greek and Hittite cultures collapsed completely, Egypt entered it's Third Intermediate period and details get fuzzy.

Yeah, that is a problem. The Bible speaks of Israel (or Judah and Israel) as great powerful but when you actually look at the histories of the great and powerful empires their basically "The who now?". At least until you get to the Persian and Roman periods where its more like "Oh, those guys.''

My theory, which has little if any basis in fact thereby putting it on an equal basis with the Old Testament is that the Pharoah who made Joseph his vizier was Akhenaton and that's where he got the monotheisticm from and when he got overthrown and Tut died and was replaced there was a backlash against the Hebrews. Another theory is that the Hebrews weren't slaves but basically migrant workers making Moses the Cesar Chavez of his time.

What is the deal with Animism in Christianity? How everything including emotions and thoughts have spirits in them? Or is it a cultural thing?

Not sure what you're talking about. The Bible by itself condemns animism, with modern Christianity having no real animistic qualities whatsoever.

It could be some form cultural interpretation, but otherwise it doesn't sound familiar.

edited 29th Dec '17 6:44:23 AM by TerminusEst

I think the closest Christianity gets is having everything contain one really big spirit.

& I guess not. It is just that I always heard from my family and other media about how "everything is a spirit". It could be a cultural thing.

Many Christians believe that God is in everything, but that isnt the same thing as animism (that everything has its own spirit).