Discover more in these hand-picked books Tell me what you think; read what others say.  
Stuff you need to know before the POCM makes sense. Ideas, rituals and myths Christianity boosted from the Pagans. Some of the Pagan's dying-resurrected godmen The Triumph of Christianity Discover mainstream scholarship about Christianity's Pagan origins What did the Christians borrow? So what?
the ideas, myths and rituals christianity borrowed from the pagans Jesus saves -- Pagan Gods saved first gods whose dad was a god and whose mom was a mortal woman Christianity has baptism -- Paganism had it first Christians share a sacred meal with their God -- Pagans did it first Christians believe in eternal life -- but Paganism believed in it first
home > pagan origins > getting started
Jesus did miracles -- Pagan Gods did them first Jesus fulfilled prophecy -- Pagan Gods fulfilled prophecy first God and the immortal soul -- Paganism had 'em first Christianity thinks it has monotheism -- Paganism had it first Jesus' God lives in Heaven on High -- Pagan Gods lived there first pagan dead went to the underworld Jesus made clever quips -- Pagan cynic philosophers made them first
Little more than equivocation

 

Why do we argue about names? Is this not really a difference over names? . . . Whether one addresses these politicians as senators or mayors matters very little, since their nature remains the same.
[J. P. Holding, showing Porphyry for the knucklehead that he is]

Is equivocation all these guys do? Is it all they have?
It's just the same old tactic we've seen time and time again: By collapsing things down to a "low common denominator" -- i.e., just referring to "the idea of one supreme God" without any concern for the unique identity and actions of that god -- it is possible to equivocate and claim that key elements of Christian theology are the same or similar to what is found in other, older religions, and thus illicitly argue that they evolved or were taken directly from these other religions.

Our debunking of Pikachu's Pagan Origins section is an outline of what manipulations Pikachu uses and how he equivocates on terms. Sure, there are some of the other usual flaws (like using post-Christian data and not mentioning it!) but by and large the name of the game here is linguistic equivocation.

More than Jesus
Pikachu would no doubt prefer to have you believe that Jimmy Swaggart represents the best Christianity has to offer that isn't liberal in outlook. He's just plain ignorant, then. Scholars like Raymond Brown already dug the hole for the pagan copycatters, and they're under 500 feet of dirt and don't realize it. Brown and others caught them at this equivocation game long ago.

And it wasn't hard to catch them at it. I mean, take the example of prayer (one Pikachu does not have a page about). He slaps his forehead and says, you know what, Pagans believed in all those things generations before Jesus. Christianity was not new.  Christianity was not unique.  By Zeus, how stupid can you get. If a god exists, isn't it just common sense that you'll try to communicate with him/her/it? Does the idea of prayer need to be "borrowed"? Of course not. That's just plain stupid.

There's more.  We'll see how Pikachu plays the same game when it comes to the Christian sacraments.   Where baptism is concerned, note that baptizo was a common word of the day -- not formally used to refer to a sacrament (as with a captial B); one could be "baptized" in wine, in swamp murk, or in trouble. A ship that was immersed in the water was "baptized". To call down a parallel between Christian and pagan "baptisms" based on the word is therefore just plain ridiculous.   Also based on common experience is the sacred meal of wine and bread...well, you'll see more when we take Pikachu to the cleaners on that one.

Let it just be said here that baptism and sacred meals were just part of the social furniture that would naturally be picked up; it didn't need to be "borrowed" any more than you need to "borrow" the idea of using a toliet in the bathroom. (But Pikachu is wrong: There is NO example of pagans thinking the meal items were the body of their Gods.

Wow! What a gullible Pokemon!

 
 

The next time you're with Lurch
ask yourself:"Isn't it sad how these pagan copycat theorists have to manipulate terminology to achieve a parallel? Isn't it telling that their methodology requires so much linguistic equivocation?"

Next time you're in church... When they get to the part about one one God, in heaven, whose Son, born of a virgin, came to earth as a man, was baptized, performed miracles, established a holy meal for his followers, died, rose again on the third day for the salvation of mankind, remember that the real matter of difference is in the details that the broad, vague terms don't cover. You'll know that neophytes like Pikachu are selling bottles of snake oil when they "forget" to cover these issues in depth.

Uhhhhhhhhhh.