>>I still think you're looking at a bowl of water, AR282, and raising a lot of shit about the bowl its in and the people who made the bowl and so on, instead of just drinking the water.<<

I don't want to be poisoned.

>>Christianity is absolutely full of challenging philosophical and moral ideas...if you can get past the rituals, the traditional forms, and the literal thinking that would try to count how many angels are on the head of a pin. The pity is that you don't seem to see the philosophy or the moral questions...you just see the rigid beliefs of some (not all) Christians...and because of them you throw out the entire bowl of water and won't drink any of it.

That is incredible to me.<<

You can get that message from any other system and don't have to wade through a bullshit tide to do it.

>>It's like rejecting all of North America as totally useless because some areas are polluted or have crime in them.<<

It's more like being taken to one of these polluted places and being told, "This is North America," and you know damned well that is not really true. There's way more to North America than that.

>>Why not quit bellyaching about the literal-minded Christians whose beliefs offend your sense of reality so much and talk to some who are not so literal-minded instead? There are plenty of those around.<<

Religions are the products of kings and royalty. It's all to glorify them in some way. Any religion inimical to the king is not going to be allowed to stay for long. That which perpetuates his power will be allowed. Christianity is such a system. It was essentially invented by a king, an emperor really, Constantine. It's royalty glorification. That's why Jesus is KING OF KINGS and PRINCE of Peace and spoke for the KINGDOM of heaven and was KING of the Jews. Buddha too was a prince. The Emperor of Japan is supposedly descended from the Sun goddess Amaterasu. Even the Renne-le-Chateau stuff puts forth the Jesus' bloodline gave birth to the Merovingian kings.

>>I agree that the Eastern religions are more broad-minded and make more sense, but they too can be made into crazy rote belief by more rigid-minded worshippers. So what? Anything can be screwed up by stupid people. Science can be too.<<

But Eastern religions have excellent philosophical systems underlying them and those systems are not forgotten or denied. You don't get anything like that with Christianity. Even the Jesuit metaphysics of Paolo Dezza, for example, is sadly lacking. Now de Chardin was pretty good but he is a single gem among a planet of crude rocks.

>>Clarify this for me. Do you believe that a man, some man, existed historically, and that he was the man who came to be known later as "Jesus" (his name was Yeshua in the language of the time)?<<

No.

>>Or do you believe that no such man ever existed at all? Never mind about the God stuff, the miracles, the virgin birth, all that fancy lore, do you believe there was a physical person, Yeshua, who went around preaching in Palestine at that time, and that the Christian religion was built later by his followers, who saw him as the "Son of God"?<<

No such person. If he existed, Paul is obviously talking about someone else because he clearly has no interest in this historical personality. But then Revelation, Hebrews and James all present very different conceptions of Jesus and clearly none regarded him as historical. You wonder how Christians can have these books in their bible and not see what is staring them in the face. It's incredible. Obviously, they don't read it. They couldn't.

>>Or are you saying there was no such person at all? Totally a figment of someone's imagination?<<

More like deliberate deception by the royalty.

>>And if so, upon what do you base your certainty that there was no such person? ;-D Upon what?????<<

There are no valid historical references about him from his time or the generation after. That the Christians borrowed Philo's concept of the Logos and he was a contemporary and yet never wrote about Christians or a Jesus Christ. Josephus was governor of Galilee and wrote a history of it that never mentioned Nazareth or Jesus. Origen tried to find Bethany and couldn't. Much of the geography of Palestine described the gospels is wrong. Jesus quotes the Greek bible. It's not a religion out of Palestine. It's a religion born in the diaspora by Greek-speakers who spent little to no time in Palestine. Jesus is just the sun--the Light of the World, the star in the east (rising sun/son). He had 12 disciples--sun in the middle of the zodiac.