Discover more in these hand-picked books What you think; 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? You are here.

getting started | how it happened | sailboat in the basement | retreat | pyrex victory | doh! | god | Judaism | differences | next time you're in church

home > the end > retreat
Retreat to "sophisticated"


"Retreat" to WHAT???
According to Pikachu, the ancient deities were real physical beings, while ythe Judeo-Christian God is a sissy spiritual God. Make sure you read that carefully. He says that the ancients had a "stronger faith" and if by that he means they were able to more naively believe in gods who were just glorifed humans, with the same foibles, maybe he is right. But if he's saying that the omnipotent, omniscient, Judeo-Christian God who created the world ex nihilo is a "sissy" compared to the gods who mostly occupied their time looking for ways to have sex with the humans -- well, just count me as one who prefers "sissies" then.

But he does seem to mean the former, really. All of his references to them believing hell and heaven were real, solid places suggests as much. In that case, Im not for sissies. I'm for hard evidence.

 

Science didn't "force" our retreat from a real physical God at all. Beliefs in such things waned long before science, and had everything to do with the advance of the great "monotheistic" faiths: Judaism (which had a "spiritual" god before Christianity), Christianity, Islam. The greatest early scientists came from these traditions. Science may have forced a retreat like this elsewhere in the world, but not where we're concerned.

Pikachu hoists the old "Galileo" canard for the second time this round as proof, but remember, that won't work (see entries here). And Galileo had nothing to do with the nature of God (physical vs spiritual).

"Naturalism"

"Empiric rationalism" is not synonymous with "science" -- the first scientists and a a majority even today are people who accept the "supernatural" as a possibility.

If Pikachu wants to stick with believing things only that can be looked at, touched, and tested, then why does he believe in the North Pole? Has be been there? He says other people looked at and touched it? Same with the resurrected Jesus. Ahhh.....

 

The next time you're with Lurch
Next time you're in church...when they get to the part about God the spiritual, supernatural being, remember Judaism had that long ago. So did Plato.

Back at the foundation of the faith, God was real. Science didn't have any effect on that. God is still "real" now.

Uhhhhhhhhhh.