← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Texas Dissident
Thread ID: 14696 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2004-08-12
2004-08-12 15:44 | User Profile
[url]http://www.thephora.org/showthread.php?t=2107[/url]
Long-time member Zoroaster no longer posts here at OD, but I see he is out and about spreading his New Agey/Shirley MacLaine/Joseph Campbell disinformation unchallenged. If he were interested in Truth, before posting the above article he could have performed a quick google to obtain scholarly documentation that refutes every point of the article he is currently pushing.
So in the interest of full disclosure and in service to the old fashioned notions of truth and integrity, following are articles/essays that refute the nonsense Zoroaster is spreading throughout various forae:
[url]http://www.tektonics.org/osy.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/zoroaster.html[/url] [url]http://www.christian-thinktank.com/copycat.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_04_02_04_PPP.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/tammuz.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/adonis01.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_04_02_04_DDD.html[/url]
2004-08-12 18:35 | User Profile
I don't know, Tex- I think you're facing an uphill battle here. I mean, with Tektonics arrayed against extensive and technical documentation such as-
[INDENT]*"The man named Graves wrote books on the similarity between religions and Christ like men. Can't remember its title. Golden Bough?
Anyway..."*[/INDENT]
Thanks for the info.
[QUOTE=Texas Dissident][url]http://www.thephora.org/showthread.php?t=2107[/url]
Long-time member Zoroaster no longer posts here at OD, but I see he is out and about spreading his New Agey/Shirley MacLaine/Joseph Campbell disinformation unchallenged. If he were interested in Truth, before posting the above article he could have performed a quick google to obtain scholarly documentation that refutes every point of the article he is pushing.
So in the interest of full disclosure and refuting enemies of Christ, following are articles/essays that refute the nonsense Zoroaster is spreading throughout various forae:
[url]http://www.tektonics.org/osy.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/zoroaster.html[/url] [url]http://www.christian-thinktank.com/copycat.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_04_02_04_PPP.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/tammuz.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/adonis01.html[/url] [url]http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_04_02_04_DDD.html[/url][/QUOTE]
2004-08-12 19:25 | User Profile
[QUOTE=weisbrot]I don't know, Tex- I think you're facing an uphill battle here. [/QUOTE]
Granted, we can only do what we can, when we can and where we can. And posting links to Mr. Holding's yeoman's work is not much, but some of these guys are just so brazen, over and over making the rounds, repeatedly posting the same old tired, worn out and discredited arguments without any responsibility or regard to the truth, it really is amazing.
All thanks should go to Mr. Holding and the invaluable tektonics website.
2004-08-12 22:54 | User Profile
If I remember correctly accuracy and scholarship were not of much concern to Zoroaster. I would bet he could not remember what I posted on Sam Francis and here: [QUOTE]In one of the great books of this century, [I][B]The Golden Bough[/B][/I], British anthropologist and historian, James George Fraser, lamented the descent of the West from Roman times. Fraser attributed the loss of the ascendancy of the West to the rise of Christianity which he termed an Oriental religion. Prior to Christianity the West had the classical civilizations of Rome and Greece where the individual was subordinate to the community or state. The safety of the state was the supreme aim of conduct and had precedence over the safety of the individual in this world or the world to come. Citizens were trained from infancy in this ideal and were willing to lay down their lives to preserve the common good. If a citizen shrank from the supreme sacrifice, he knew that he behaved cowardly in preferring his existence to the good of the country.
The spreading of Oriental religions with their emphasis on the salvation of the soul and the communion of the soul with God as the aspiration of an educated man doomed this civilization. The prosperity and even the existence of the state shrank into insignificance. Fraser termed the spiritual basis of the Oriental religions a "selfish and immoral doctrine" which caused the devotee to withdraw from public service and contemn present life as merely a probationary period for a better, eternal life. With this emphasis on future life the bonds of civilized life were undone, and the disintegration of society began. Ties of family and state were loosened, and the society began to dissolve into individual elements. Individuals refusing to subordinate their private interests to the public good which does constitute the core of any civilization, even in the United States, caused this relapse into barbarism. Men refused to defend their own country and to continue their own kind. This idiocy persisted for a thousand years. Only at the close of the Medieval Ages did native ideals of life and conduct which Fraser termed "saner, manlier views of the world" prevail in Europe. The hiatus in the march of civilization was ended, and the tide of Oriental religion had been halted. Writing in the years before World War I, Fraser thought the invasion was still ebbing. [/QUOTE]You may disagree with what I wrote, but please feel free to do so.
2004-08-13 14:59 | User Profile
[QUOTE=edward gibbon]If I remember correctly accuracy and scholarship were not of much concern to Zoroaster. I would bet he could not remember what I posted on Sam Francis and here: You may disagree with what I wrote, but please feel free to do so.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.tektonics.org/pagint.html[/url]
...the construct of the dying-rising god. A full scholarly study of the history of this concept has yet to be written, but suffice it to say here that it was popularised by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. Frazer believed that primitive peoples linked the annual cycles of agriculture with 'corn spirits' (a concept which he borrowed from the German scholar Mannhardt). In its developed form, the theology of these primitive agriculturalists posited that the corn spirit died and was reborn annually, typically in the form of the divine king in whom it was incarnated. Frazer believed that the religions of the ancient Near East provided several examples of dying-rising gods who had emerged from primitive belief-systems similar to these, most notably Attis, Adonis and Osiris.
**Frazer's theory is loaded with problems. Whole papers, even books, criticising his theory have been written, and nowadays it is extremely difficult to find any recognised, reputable anthropologists who will accept it even in a modified form. Here are some of the major difficulties with it: Frazer's sources were frequently inaccurate or irrelevant, or else he interpreted them in tendentious ways. **
Frazer himself subscribed to discredited nineteenth-century ideas such as the evolutionist model of human societal development (which has nothing to do with the theory of biological evolution and is today firmly rejected by experts) and the notion that present-day primitive tribesmen can be studied as a means of finding out what things were like at the dawn of civilisation. Evidence which has emerged since Frazer wrote has not merely failed to back up his hypotheses: it has fatally undermined them. For interesting critiques of Frazer's work, see e.g. Sir Edmund Leach's articles in Daedalus 90 (1961) and Current Anthropology 7 (1966); also (in much greater detail) J.Z.Smith, 'The Glory, Jest and Riddle', Diss. Yale 1969 (by one of the greatest living historians of religion).
The greatest problem with Frazer, however, is that construct of the dying-rising god is simply a fantasy. The distinguished scholar J.Z.Smith, a man who most certainly cannot be regarded as a defender of Christianity, wrote an important article for Mircea Eliade's 'Encyclopedia of Religion' (New York 1987) in which he took every alleged example of a dying-rising god and showed that none of them actually fit the category. (My own researches lead me to believe that the Phoenician god Melqart, whom Smith does not discuss, is the one exception - but he is very much the exception.) Certainly, Frazer's star witnesses of Attis, Adonis and Osiris suffer from the fatal flaw in each case of dying and then failing to be resurrected.
Even if Frazer and his followers were right about the dying-rising god, the relevance to Christianity would be doubtful. The Christian story makes no connection whatever between Christ and the agricultural year or the rhythms of the natural world. Moreover, Frazer's followers who elaborated his work with particular reference to the ancient Near East made it clear that their dying-rising gods and kings were tightly enmeshed in a series of bizarre annual rites with no conceivable parallels in Christianity.
[url]http://www.tektonics.org/campbellj01.html[/url]
**Campbell adhered still to the ideas of James Frazer (The Golden Bough), whose work has long been rejected ** comments by a classical scholar of our acquaintance here), and it is also clear by reading his texts that he tried very hard to force a mystical template on Judeo-Christian religious concepts, and did so by way of illicit generalizing. It is what we have seen used to more deleterious effect by the myth-crowd:
Calling various figures "Saviors" with no attention paid to what they saved (from death? from a hard life? postage stamps?).
Quoting the poet William Blake on the book of Job [11], who interprets it in mystical terms (i.e., Satan as "The Great Selfhood") which would never be found from interpreters familiar with ANE literature.
Referring to any return to life from death in terms of a "resurrection" [29 -- done here with Osiris the Lego god!].
Citing later Christian syncretism of pagan ideas and symbols without regard for whether such importation was in any sense alien to the first-century apostolic faith. (Though nowhere does Campbell lay out what he thinks is the significance of the parallels, practically speaking.)
Citing Christian baptism [239] as a parallel to such stories as an Indian Goddess of nature emerging from the primal waters [! -- a rather misconstrued idea of the point of baptism; see here].
In Hero, citing cases of women impregnated by gods as "virgin births" -- not one case being a matter of divine fiat creation.
By all accounts, Frazer doesn't appear to be someone whose opinion should be counted as very credible.
2004-08-14 10:21 | User Profile
Here's a take on James Frazer on the Ebla forum:
[url]http://eblaforum.org/main/viewtopic.php?t=508[/url]
Excerpt from the article shows that Frazer was not totally approved even on his own times:
[COLOR=Red] "Earlier, he had quoted William James as writing that Frazer "thinks that trances, etc., of savage soothsayers, oracles and the like are all feigned! Verily science is amusing"[/COLOR]
(William James was a famous and by no means orthodox scholar on religious phenomena)
[COLOR=Blue] Posted: Mon Jul 26, 2004 8:48 am
[SIZE=4]Post subject: Putting the mystery to rest [/SIZE]
Freke and Gandy's work, The Jesus Mysteries has speculated that the dying and rising gods of the ancient Near East are the model for Jesus in the gospel stories. One assertion they make is in creating a conflation of pagan gods involving Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Mithra, and so on. A number of scholars have already discredited this link, as it stems from the works of Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941). As we shall see, the reasons for its disappearance from scholarship (albeit apart from some vestigial categories, which are also under attack) has to do with its poor evidence, failure to make functional distinctions, and lack of grounding in primary texts. Below is a summary of Mark S. Smith's treatment on the subject in The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts, from Chapter 6, "The Life and Death of Baal". He focuses his methodological critique on the category of "dying and rising gods" as this is still in use in some scholarship, because the rest of Frazer's work is largely rejected aside from this category.
J.G. Frazer [whom F&G are thematically reliant upon (though he is quoted rarely but cited more often)] attempted to create a synthesis of the Near Eastern religions through thematic parallels involving dying and rising gods. His works included The Golden Bough (1890), Adonis Attis Osiris (1906), and then merging of the two in the third edition of The Golden Bough (1911-1915). For Frazer, the connection between the vegetation cycle (planting, growing, harvest, death, replanting, etc.) marked the connections between the gods such as the Egyptian Osiris, Sumerian Dumuzi, Akkadian Tammuz, Anatolian Attis, and classical Adonis. For him, these deities were the spirits of crops that were grown around the Mediterranean and elsewhere. Thus the narratives and ritual surrounding these gods represented the seasonal cycle, containing the key elements:
The divine status of the figures
Their death and resurrection
Correspondence with this cycle and the cycle of fertility
Rituals and cultic context for the recitation and performance of this thematic cycle
W. Robertson Smith, a friend and mentor of J.G. Frazer, was cited as the credit for this idea of the slain god, and indeed it was Smith who originally made a connection with the death and resurrection of Baal with the seasonal cycle and then with Jesus in 1889. Frazer's first edition of The Golden Bough a year later, avoided the comparison. However, subsequent editions of Smith's Lectures (in which the comparison was made) removed the comparison, while Frazer began to extend the comparison of Jesus with other dying and rising gods beginning with his second edition in 1900. There were some differences between the two--for Smith, Osiris was not among these gods, while Dionysus did not merit inclusion as a non-Semitic deity.
Problems with the category
Criticisms of Frazer's work came within his own lifetime, primarily from anthropologists, based on methodologies developed by the greats of the generation like Bronislaw Malinowski and E.E. Evans-Pritchard. For them, faults lay within the "comparative method" of Frazer, and the critiques became less and less respectful as subsequent editions and assertions came out. The concern was that fieldwork must be carried out within cultures and work methodologically toward interpreting features of religion within specific societies. Frazer's abstractions, isolated from cultural and historical contexts (which were poorly understood, attested or represented) produced imaginary categories. This approach was termed "patternism" and while dominant in the mid-20th century, has declined since 1970 with more sophisticated approaches to anthropology, history, religion, mythology, and folklore.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had become aware of Frazer's work around 1930, wrote:
The most noticeable thing seems to me not merely the similarities, but also the differences throughout all these rites. It is a wide variety of faces with common features that keep showing in one place and in another. And one would like to draw lines joining the parts that various faces have in common. But then a part of our contemplation would still be lacking, namely what connects this picture with our own feelings and thoughts. This part gives contemplation in depth.
Wittgenstein's notes were replete with similar criticisms, showing how Frazer's detection of "similarities" revealed more about Frazer's assumptions and perhaps less of the cultures he studied. Cyrus Gordon was more ascerbic: "[T]he great mass of scholarly writing on Baal, who is supposed to die for the rainless summer and return to life for the rainy winter, misses the point of ancient Near Eastern religion as a reflection of Near Eastern climate."
It was then left to historians of religion to pick up the many negative lessons of Frazer and others (including F.F. Hvidberg, T.H. Gaster, and G. Widengren--Gaster had seen fit to categorise Tammuz, Osiris, Telepinu, Attis, Adonis, and Persephone). It was clear that Frazer's work represented his attempt to explain the death and resurrection of Jesus. Frazer's citation of De Dea Syria 7's correlation between Adonis of Byblos and Osiris accepted uncritically the classical assumptions of the author--indeed most classical authors interpreted Semitic deities through identifications between gods of different regions--these same authors, like Frazer, were outsiders to the religions they were observing [worse, if any mystery cult was involved!] trying to define foreign practices and beliefs according to categories they could understand. The comparative approach of both Frazer and the classical writers abstracted generalisations and then assumed their validity.
[--M.S. Smith provides here a god-by-god analysis of Semitic gods with Osiris, Dumuzi/Tammuz, Melqart, Tyrian Herakles, Adonis (who is Semitic, viz. the god attested as Ugaritic 'adn, Phoenician 'dn, Biblical Hebrew, 'adôn "lord"), and an unknown Phoenician god. He then follows with an in-depth analysis of Baal. I can abstract these if anyone is interested--]
Frazer's contribution of highlighting the theme of natual fertility and divinity in some of the deities involved is granted. However, this category of "dying and rising gods" became an artificial construct to which his gods would not have fit (especially now as more primary evidence becomes available). Smith writes, "The source for much of this new creation was the classical literature that provided him with a model as he linked different figures and attributed a negative psychological mindset to their ancient worshippers. Frazer's new mythology was cast in the new idiom of the nascent anthropology and assumed the mantel of authority." (Earlier, he had quoted William James as writing that Frazer "thinks that trances, etc., of savage soothsayers, oracles and the like are all feigned! Verily science is amusing.") A. Livingstone has approached from a different angle, noting that the relationship between myth (the dying/rising god) and ritual (rites of fertility) are not clear at all--writing about Dumuzi, "it is absolutely certain that the myths did not originally belong to the rituals, and the rituals did not originally mean the myths. ... religious or cult drama in the sense of a conscious enactment of myth is not involved." Likewise, for Baal, the ritual with nature and myth was not a celebration of death and resurrection of the god, but a royal funerary ritual. Smith concludes somewhat cautiously:
In any case, the evidence does not support a ritual appraoch to the complex of material grouped under the category of "dying and rising gods," at least for Ugarit [Semitic gods included] and Israel. An attempt to resuscitate Frazer's category must drastically modify its basic criteria, perhaps so much so that Frazer would barely recognise it.
We can see here, the problems with Freke and Gandy's book apparent. Their acceptance of the transformation of Osiris and Adonis by classical writers into the caricatures of "mystery religions" (as primary evidence, no less) is the first warning sign. They have simply assumed Frazer's category and assumptions, already rejected for methodological reasons, but also in careful analysis--royal mortuary rituals involving Osiris and Baal are not the same as that of the fertility cycle. Baal is a storm god, not a fertility god. It is not clear that Adonis, Dumuzi/Tammuz, Herakles or Melqart return to life--indeed the evidence for most of these is very thin. And once one considers differences, it becomes apparent that the category is a chimaera, and Freke and Gandy's use of his work and categorisation is merely old wine in new bottles.
Joel
"No matter what his unavoidable premises and predilections, any student of human affairs is bound sooner or later to come across evidence that is profoundly disturbing. Then he has the task of coming to terms with it honestly." --Barrington Moore Jr. [/COLOR]