Freethought Nation

Ok, I just watched both versions and the edit is very obvious.

Video 1


Video 2


It would be interesting to take the video and input the correct information right after each false claim he makes and then post it as a rebuttal. For instance, when he says that Isis was not a virgin and there's no evidence from Egyptian sources that she was, then flash to "I am the Great Virgin". And so on for every other false claim. That would shut down this apologetic nonsense.

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

I honestly sometimes wonder I should thank Dr. Forbes for all his absurd comments that were so easily proven false.

Forbes eyes wide shut - his research tactic is obviously to close his eyes & ears and sing la, la, la

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

well I do know zeitgeist says the bible says jesus was born on december 25 which to me was a glaring mistake?or an outright misdirection becuase it obviously makes no such claim.One good reason to believe the jesus account is because the talmud makes such a point of telling how he is being tortured for eternity along with mary,and relates how they are low fornicators and prostitutes. so that would give one thought why would they do this for a myth? I think not.

Zeitgeist points out that the Christmas nativity is based on the sky on Christmas Eve and how the progression of stars through the night lead into the sun rising one degree to the north thus ending the three day solstice, or standstill. And that is correct, the nativity scene is borrowed mythology oriented around ancient winter solstice celebration. In our calendar and to our understanding that morning is the morning of the month of December on the 25th day. In other calendars the winter solstice went by other names, but it's the winter solstice which is being addressed in the myth regardless of which calendar one chooses to use to describe the end of the winter solstice.


No, actually that's a very big reason NOT to believe the Jesus account because the Talmud is older than the Jesus myth to begin with and merely takes an existing myth and slanders it, obviously because Jews were mad at Christians and wants to drag their God-Man myth through the mud out of spite. It's very obvious what the Talmud writers were doing. Why would they do this for a myth? Well because it's a myth that they hated and a myth which brought hatred and persecution on the Jewish people. So the Jews hated the Jesus myth in return and tried to lash back at it with the slander we find in these late written Talmudic sources...

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

No, Zeitgeist never claimed that the Bible says Jesus was born on December 25th. It merely says Jesus was born on December 25th, which according to many sources, is true. There are other sources for Christian mythology besides the Bible, just like there are other sources for Judaism besides the Old Testament, like the Talmud for example, and other sources for Egyptian mythology besides just the Pyramid Texts or the Book of the Dead, and other sources for Greek mythology besides just the Iliad or the Odyssey, etc.

It is only a small portion of the Christian community that abides by the belief of "sola scriptura", and even that belief is comparatively recent in the full scale of Christian history, hell, it didn't even begin with the Protestant reformation.
But especially in the early years of Christianity, there was no sola scriptura rule because there simply was no scriptura. The earliest of the church fathers cite Apostolic tradition and the Old Testament as their authority more than they do any "New Testament" literature. Just give Clement of Rome a read over.
And even after the New Testament books came along, sola scriptura was still not a common practice because there still wasn't a SOLE scriptura. There were many different Christianities, all claiming to be just as valid as the next, and each claiming to have their own canon. Did you know that the first New Testament canon in church history was composed by a heretic? And as late as 140 CE? Marcion collected the earliest New Testament in church history, and it didn't have all the books now included. It was only AFTER he did that, THEN the Catholics like Irenaeus, in their jealousy, started claiming the rights to those books and started forming their own canon. And even the earliest orthodox New Testaments had MORE books than the New Testaments today. Look in your Bible and see if you can find the Shepherd of Hermas or the Epistle of Barnabas. They used to be in the New Testament, but not anymore.
To quote renown biblical scholar, Dr. Bart Ehrman-
"The wide diversity of early Christianity may be seen above all in the theological beliefs embraced by people who understood themselves to be followers of Jesus. In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed in one God. But there were others who insisted that there were two. Some said there were thirty. Others claimed there were 365.
In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that God had created the world. But others believed that this world had been created by a subordinate, ignorant divinity. (Why else would the world be filled with such misery and hardship?) Yet other Christians thought it was worse than that, that this world was a cosmic mistake by a malevolent divinity as a place of imprisonment, to trap humans and subject them to pain and suffering.
In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that the Jewish Scripture (the Christian "Old Testament") was inspired by the one true God. Others believed it was inspired by the God of the Jews, who was not the one true God. Others believed it was inspired by an evil deity. Others believed it was not inspired.
In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that Jesus was both divine and human, God and man. There were other Christians who argued that he was completely divine and not humans at all. (For them divinity and humanity were incommensurate entities: God can no more be a man than a man can be a rock.) There were other who insisted that Jesus was two things: a full flesh-and-blood human, Jesus, and a fully divine being, Christ, who had temporarily inhabited Jesus' body during his ministry and left him prior to his death, inspiring his teachings and miracles but avoiding the suffering in its aftermath.
In the second and third centuries there were Christians who believed that Jesus' death brought about the salvation of the world. There were other Christians who though that Jesus' death has nothing to do with the salvation of the world. There were yet other Christians who said that Jesus never died.
How could some of these views be considered Christian? Or to put the question differently, how could people who considered themselves Christian hold such views? Why did they not consult their Scriptures to see that there were not 365 gods, or that the true God had created the world, or that Jesus had died? Why didn't they just read the New Testament?
It is because there was no New Testament. To be sure, the books that were eventually collected into the New Testament had been written by the second century. But they had not yet been gathered into a widely recognized and authoritative canon of Scripture. And there were other books written as well, with equally impressive pedigrees--other Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses claiming to be written by the earthly apostles of Jesus."

There has never been a sole scriptura, let a alone a doctrine of sola scriptura, until AFTER the protestant reformation, and even then, not even most protestants abide by the canon alone, they will adhere to traditions as well.

And so for those of us outside of the Christian community, the various canons of scirpture have no more authority concerning the Jesus biography than do the many traditions and non canonical scriptures floating around.

And BTW, Irenaeus lets us know that the idea that Jesus was born in December goes back at least as early as Simon Magus, who was a contemporary with the apostles.



I've never read anything in the Talmudic literature about Jesus or Mary being prostitutes. It does say Mary his mother was a fornicator who cheated on her husband with a Roman soldier named Panthera, and that this Panthera was the biological father of Jesus.

But you're on a slippery slope by appealing to Talmudic tradition, because for one thing, you are now allowing for appeals to oral tradition that was finally written down only after the canonical NT books, and that itself is not considered canonical by Christianity. Yet those are the very two reasons why some Christians reject the December 25th birthday- it's not canonical, and it's only an (allegedly) late oral tradition.
So to appeal to the Talmud while rejecting Christian oral tradition sounds like special pleading.

The other slippery slope here is that the Talmud also says a lot of other things that contradict the canonical New Testament story.
Like that Jesus only had five disciples, that he was born from adultery, that he lived in Egypt until adulthood, which is were he learned Egyptian magical spells that he tattooed on his skin, and that this was the means by which he performed his miracles, and because of this he was put to trial, and then stoned, not crucified, but stoned to death, and then post-humously hung on a tree, as Deuteronomy commands. And it says that Mary's husband was not Joseph, but Pappos Ben Yehuda, and this guy lived until the early 2nd century.
Etc., etc. So again, appealing to the Talmudic traditions puts you in a very weird position that I am curious to see how you reconcile without admitting to special pleading.

Vishnu, you hit the nail on the head! When are Christians going to realize that it is not mythicists, atheists, or deists that made up these "traditions" of Christmas being on December 25th, the 3 kings and the others that are pointed out in the ZG video? I recently came across the website where the three kings actually have names, I mean seriously, who came up with this stuff? When is the last time any of the groups mentioned above put on a Christmas play or put up signs that "JESUS is the reason for the season" around December 25th?

WHY can't they see the correlation of Palm Sunday and the Osiris procession that was held yearly with Palm trees or the yearly Passion play that was put on for Osiris? THEY carry out these traditions, not us! We are just pointing out the parallels, while they stomp their feet and scream "NO IT AIN'T" after the evidence is shown repeatedly.

Every time I hear the argument that Christians KNOW that Jesus was not born on December 25th, I ask them why they keep celebrating it on that date if they know better??? This has been going on for 1700 years!!! Of course, there is no VALID answer for that, except that they have just accepted it as a tradition, just like MANY of us did when we were Christians! They presume that we have no clue about their religion, but most of us HAVE been there, done that, and seen it for what it is.

...Amen to that.

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Dear Changingmyself,

Thought you may want to know that two of the said kings issued Buddhist coins.
Here is a short excerpt from my monograph on scholarly prejudice on the Buddhist sources of Christianity.

""The same Christian scholars that introduce the apostle Thomas in India as evidence of a Buddhist borrowing, fail to cover the other later legends of Thomas in India such as the song ‘of the soul’ he was said to compose in an Indian prison, or the legend of him baptizing the three wise men. Also not mentioned is that a few of these wise-men, or kings, mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, were named in early Christian literature and they are known to have Buddhist marks on their coins (see coins of Gaspardi and Gondophares Sases IV). These same kings left their names on Buddhist stupas which they either built, or, in some cases, they took from the Indo-Scyths, who took them from the Greco-Buddhist kings Demetrius and Menander (at Sirkap). These same kings must have had the same type of Buddhism that made Kanishka worry about Buddha’s counterfeit religion (dharama-pratirupaka).

Sorry, Matthew does not mention these kings, I believe they are mentioned in western sources for the first time in Alexandrian works. The several Buddha birthdays that coincide with Jesus' is also mentioned first, as far as we know, in Alexandria.

I see people use the reference "kings" instead of magi/magus. I thought the reference of "kings" came very late, or are there early references where "kings" are used?

Birth of Buddha - Kushan period 1-300 AD.



Adoration of 3, mother of Buddha, sister of Buddha and the "water pitcherer". Two completely different ideas and events as we can see from how they are expressed by images.

_________________
Eyvitar firna - er maðr annan skal, þess er um margan gengr guma; heimska ór horskum - gerir hölða sonu - sá inn máttki munr.

Never place blame on man, because it happens to all. No matter how wise, a fool he becomes, when love steals his powers.

Hávamál

Dear Vahall,

Yes, i may have misled you by accident, they are called kings later. Further confirming that the fictional Magi were Buddhists was that the staffs they carried were said to have a metal ring on the end. The same staff was carried by Buddhist missionaries and the Buddhist monastic code (vinya) mentions they are allowed to warn animals on the path.

You wrote "Adoration of 3, mother of Buddha, sister of Buddha and the "water pitcherer". Two completely different ideas and events as we can see from how they are expressed by images" __I have no idea what you are trying to say.

The legends around Thomas going to India have been thoroughly debunked!, O' and Buddha also had a well known "doubting" disciple who was called "twin (Yamaka)" (See my book, Father and Son, East is West)

from wiki on Biblical Magi;


""These names apparently derive from a Greek manuscript probably composed in Alexandria around 500 A.D., and which has been translated into Latin with the title Excerpta Latina Barbari. Another Greek document from the 8th century, of presumed Irish origin and translated into Latin with the title Collectanea et Flores, continues the tradition of three kings and their names and gives additional details
Caspar is also sometimes given as Gaspar or Jaspar. One candidate for the origin of the name Caspar appears in the Acts of Thomas as Gondophares (AD 21 – c.AD 47), i.e., Gudapharasa (from which 'Caspar' might derive as corruption of 'Gaspar'). This Gondophares declared independence from the Arsacids to become the first Indo-Parthian king and who was allegedly visited by Thomas the Apostle. His name is perpetuated in the name of the Afghan city Kandahar, which he founded under the name Gundopharron

The general lists like the Osiris/Horus list quoted below exists because, for example, we had people in the 19th century like Gerald Massey (who was heavily peer reviewed by the top Egyptologists of his day) trying to explain these parallels to a mostly Christian audience who knew absolutely nothing about the Egyptian religion. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs weren't translated until after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. "until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's troops in 1799 and the subsequent translation of such by Champollion in 1822, no one could read Egyptian hieroglyphs!"

They were trying to explain the pre-Christian parallels in such a way that even Christian authorities would understand. Justin Martyr did something similar around 150ce in his first apology:

"And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you [PAGANS] believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter...."

The parallels do not have to be exact carbon copies and, in fact, it's absurd to expect them to be. These concepts have evolved over time with similarities and differences due to environment, culture and era. The point is that the CONCEPTS existed throughout the Egyptian religion and influenced many religions, including Christianity.

So, what we have today is the same thing that happened to those 19th century scholars connecting the parallels; people like Acharya S and many others getting abused and derogated for trying to explain the Egyptian myths in a format that even Christians could understand. It appears that Christians detest seeing any connections made.

Tat tvam asi explains:




Also see, The "Son" of God is the "Sun" of God

The Mythicist Position video

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

There is no scholarly evidence supporting any of the claims made in Zeitgeist. The pagan-parallel thesis was refuted by scholars in the first half of the 20th century.

Do you allow opposite views here?

Videos:
Dr. Habermas (A Short Debate)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq64qX7bNNU


Mark Foreman Refuting Zeitgeist (New Video)
http://vimeo.com/39513078

Books
Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus, pp.157-187.
Nash, The Gospel and the Greeks.
Holding, Shattering the Christ Myth. (This book deals specifically with the claims in Zeitgeist, Achara A, etc).
Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection.
Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible.

Dr. Forbes has long since been addressed here, please read carefully as this also concerns everyone else out there making the same claims as Chris Forbes:

http://www.truthbeknown.com/chrisforbeszeitgeist.html

And of course there is a source book out which goes over the entire transcript from ZG1 point by point showing every possible citation:

The New Zeitgeist Part 1 Sourcebook (August 2010) Transcript

Zeitgeist Part 1 & the Supportive Evidence

In the above links you will find many relevant points that also address the usual apologetic claims on the internet like those of Habermas, Licona, Holding, Strobel, etc.

Here's some additional reading material that concerns Foreman specifically: http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/vie ... =19&t=3977

Obviously, there's nothing that you've mentioned so far which hasn't already been covered thoroughly and more than once. You may also wish to do some background researching with our search engine and see what you can find around here concerning your favorite apologists before name dropping as if that means anything...

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Why do we always get these hit and run Christian apologists? Can't they ever just simply stay and defend their claims instead of making claims, posting sources that are by apologists (the only exception was the Mettinger source) and then never returning to defend themselves. I am convinced that these individuals are more trolls than anything else.