Wow. Other people believed in gods. Can you imagine?
[J. P. Holding, 36]

Was Christianity new?  Was Christianity unique?  Maybe I was too hasty in judging Pikachu's section on afterlife as his most asinine. He hasn't done the part on "soul" yet, but this and the "everyone believed in a god" area forebodes yet another tale told by an idiot, as Shakespeare would say.

God!
Seriously. Unbelievably. Pikachu wants to say that the idea of God -- a universal and way older than Christianity or Judaism -- is some sort of evidence for "parallel". Duh!

Folks, there are only three alternatives here: 1) no gods at all; 2) one god; 3) more than one god. That's it.

And come on folks -- once you have gods, they either:
	care about humans; or,
	they don't. It's really that simple.

Pikachu quotes Hesiod (via Plato) as saying that men can pray to avert wrath, appease the gods with sacrifices, and seek atonement for sin. Big whoop! Look folks: One of the leading theistic arguments is the moral argument -- one which, simply put, declares that morals have their foundation in a Creator. Given this argument, of a Supreme Lawgiver, it is just simple logic that you 1) need to be in communication with this Lawgiver; 2) you need to make sure you're right with Him/Her/It. Only a complete ignoramus would claim that this needed to be "BORROWED" by any culture from another. It's just logical theistic sense.

If they do care, then they do something about us. The moral argument for deity also presupposes that they will be concerned for our sin. So Pikachu's wiseacre "Sound familiar?" razz is just a bunch of hot air.

Pikachu culls a sound bite from Mortimer Adler's The Great Ideas about fundamental agreements between paganism and Judeo-Christian regarding the nature of the divine. Come on guys -- it's just more logic. The gods are either personal or impersonal (as in certain Eastern beliefs); there's no alternative. If they're personal, then intelligence and will is part of the same package, and they either care about us or they don't. You may as well speak of the idea of "borrowing" the use of words in speech.

And despite Pikachu, no intelligent response to this will be that these tales are "fiction" or "silly myths". One way or the other, the real test is arguments and history -- not some primitive, simplistic, "A looks like B, so A must be a copy of B".

There's no need to take individual looks at Pikachu's random quotes from ancient texts about miracles and divine forgiveness. It's all part of the same logical progression, and it's an absurdity to argue that we need to hypothesize "borrowing" as a cause.