Zeitgiest Movie Claims.. Are they true ?

Discussion in 'Religion Archives' started by Challenger78, Oct 27, 2007.

  1. Challenger78 Valued Senior Member

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    7,536
    The first part of the following movie states that the Judeo Christian Religions were copied directly off egyptian, and early Sun worshipping cults.
    Is what this movie saying true or complete bollocks ?

    http://zeitgeistmovie.com/
     
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  3. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    I'm no expert on this topic, but I've heard that Christianity absorbed many ideas from the pagan religions that came before it. Rather than trying to make the pagans quit celebrating their old holidays, they kept them and just gave them Christian names. That's how we ended up with things like the Christmas tree and the easter bunny. I mean, what possible connection does a bunny delivering chocolate eggs have to Christ's cruxifiction and rebirth?
     
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  5. Hapsburg Hellenistic polytheist Valued Senior Member

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    In a way, yes.

    Judaism is, for all practical purposes, a revised sun-worship. The Hebrew god Yahweh was based off the Egyptian cult of the sun-god Aten and Babylonian sun deities. Eventually, this henotheism developed into monotheism, and the god previously associated with the sun was associated with All.

    Christianity was based on Judaism, but with an extra fold of hero-worship or saviour-worship, which is the cult of Jesus. The early Christian church was, really, a schismatic personality cult within Judaism, and it was by far not the only one. It was, however, the most successful, because it adapted foreign ideas and beliefs into its own belief system.
     
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  7. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

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    Please present your evidence considering Egyptian god Aten.
    Wrong. Maybe it is based on it now, but it wasn't based for the first three centuries. Read Thomas gospel for example.
    There was no one early Christian church/organisation. The most known division is between traditionalists (proto-catholics) and gnostics.
    But there were also local variations, like the coptic church in Egypt.
     
  8. Grantywanty Registered Senior Member

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    Was the Thomas gospel every widely accepted?
     
  9. Wisdom_Seeker Speaker of my truth Valued Senior Member

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    When the Christian religion was made "official" by the Roman empire, the Romans had a basic main problem. 40% of people were Christian, another 40% were followers of Mythra, and the another 20% were "pagans", like Egyptians, Greeks, etc...
    So what they did was adapt certain traditions like Christmas (Mythras birthday), or the solar disc (Egyptian), and merged all into one big religion, the Roman Christianity. This was done so people from all religions and beliefs can adapt to Christianity more easily.
     
  10. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

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    19,083
    Sorry, no library cards have survived

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    but Thomas gospel was known in Greece, Rome and Egypt.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas
     
  11. KrisSam Registered Member

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    i was blown away by this movie, and as well am very interested in learning more about the validity of the claims. does anyone have any links or anything to help point me in the right direction?
     
  12. lastelement Registered Member

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    1
    complete bollocks. theres a giant gray area in time between where moses walked the land and where egyptian mythology came about. i quit going to church because of this same controversy, but its nothing.
     
  13. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    The human psyche is a very complex thing, it's altogether too simple for it to find patterns in things that aren't there. Quite frankly the whole aspect to religion brought about by the Zeitgeist movie is only there to do one thing, create controversy with those that find controversy in it.

    I personally found no collation with any of it, Religion to me has been dead in the water for centuries however we still have the blind blindly following people that manipulate, control and dominate them. (Which is what that movie really gets at towards the end, religion was just the tip of the iceberg to their 'String Theory', which incidentally is not to be confused with 'Quantum String Theory'.)
     
  14. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I wouldn't be too surprised if there was some Egyptian influence. Religions can evolve like living things do.
     
  15. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

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    19,083
    I'm not sure that there is any worth talking about religion that is not somehow influenced from prior beliefs.
     
  16. LuckyNumbers Registered Member

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    Yes, they are true

    I have done quite a bit of reading up on the claims from the religion portion of the Zeitgeist movie and the claims do hold up.

    Check out the reference page at the movies website. They do a pretty good job of providing sources to back up their claims. After a bunch of further investigation into this ... I can only conclude that they barely scratched the surface of the matter. Jesus was taken from many religions and the ancient Egyptian myths are the primary foundation for the Judeo-Christian and Islamic faiths. I think they left that part out in the movie. All three religions are tied to Egyptian mythology. That makes perfect sense when you see that the Hebrew people fled Egypt during the Exodus. They did not leave their religions behind when they moved. They took their religions with them and made them their own.
     
  17. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

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    19,083
    Oh, come on, why forget the Babylonian, Mesopotamic myths? They are much closer to various stories in the old testament than anything else in Egyptian myths, which is quite natural them being middle eastern and in the same territory.

    In the Ancient (old) world there were three great civilizations/empires - Egypt, Assyria and Babylonia,
    as well as the fourth one for a short while - The Land of the Hittites. The first three were the crossroads of culture, and they influenced everything greatly.
     
  18. LuckyNumbers Registered Member

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    Amen and the Ankh

    Christians and Muslims say Amen because of Egyptian myth.
    Amun and Amen are the same thing.

    During the 18th Dynasty reign of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), a single god named Aten was introduced. That would probably be the reason people still use the word Amen in prayers.

    The Ankh is the cross.

    Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph signifying "life," a cross surmounted by a loop and known in Latin as a crux ansata (ansate, or handle-shaped, cross). It is found in ancient tomb inscriptions, including those of the king Tutankhamen, and gods and pharaohs are often depicted holding it. The ankh forms part of hieroglyphs for such concepts as health and happiness. The form of the symbol suggests perhaps a sandal strap as its original meaning, though it has been seen as representing a magical knot. As a cross, it has been extensively used in the symbolism of the Coptic Christian church -- Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica.

    Here is the definition from the Guinness Encyclopedia of Signs and Symbols, p. 91. -
    Ankh the most valued symbol of the ancient Egyptians, also known as crux aitsata, or the 'ansate' or 'handled cross'. It combines two symbols, the tau cross - 'life', and the circle - 'eternity', thus together 'immortality', and also the male and female symbols of the two principal Egyptian deities Osiris and Isis, thus the union of heaven and earth. In hieroglyphic writing, it stands for 'life' or 'living', and forms part of words such as 'health' and 'happiness'. Egyptians wore the ankh as an amulet to prolong life on earth, and were buried with it to ensure their 'life to come' in the afterworld; belief in the ankh's power was reinforced by its resemblance to a key which would unlock the gates of death. This 'key' symbol was also carved on canal walls on the Nile, in the belief that its presence would control the flow of water and so avoid both floods and drought. The ankh was adopted by the early Coptic Christians of Egypt who also used it on their monuments to symbolize life after death. In more recent times, the ankh has been used by witches in spells and rituals involving divination, fertility and health.
     
  19. LuckyNumbers Registered Member

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    The Egyptians did borrow from many cultures ... but Judeo-Christian ideas came from Egypt. The Greeks and Romans attributed their knowledge to the Egyptians. I know that the Egyptians were not the first ... they were just the ones that held is directly before Judaism or Christianity sprung up.
     
  20. LuckyNumbers Registered Member

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    Catholic Apologist Twisted View

    Check out the Catholic Encyclopedia on Egypt. They admit that there was a sect of Christianity in Egypt that pre-dates their own. It is funny to watch the way that they denounce things as being untrue ... when you know damn good and well that they are. I love reading it as a source to get a laugh. Remember - the Catholics said the world was flat when all the evidence said it was round. They are notorious liars.


    1. Early Christianity in Egypt

    We have no direct evidence of Christianity having existed in Egypt until Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 150-220) when it had already spread over the land. What we know of the Church of Egypt before that time is exclusively through inferences or unconfirmed traditions preserved principally by Eusebius (see below). Thus we may infer the existence of Christianity in Egypt during the second century from the fact that under Trajan a Greek version of the "Gospel According to the Hebrews" was being circulated there (Duchesne, Histoire Ancienne de l'Eglise, I, 126). We know that this gospel was the book of the Judeo-Christians. Its very name points to the existence at the same date of another Christian community, recruited from among the Gentiles. This, presumably, followed another Gospel which Clement of Alexandria calls "the Gospel According to the Egyptians". (On the Gospel of the Egyptians, see Harnack, Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur, I, 1, pp. 612-622; on the Gospel of the Hebrews, ibid., pp. 631-49).


    Again, organized Christianity at an early date in Egypt is, indirectly at least, attested by the activity of the Gnostic schools in that country in the third and fourth decades of the second century. Eusebius is authority that "Basilides the heresiarch", founder of one of these schools, came to prominence in the year 134. Other Egyptian founders of such schools, Valentinus and Carpocrates, belong to the same period. Valentinus had already moved to Rome in 140, under the pontificate of Pope Hyginus (Irenæus, Adv. Hær., III, iv, 3), after having preached his doctrines in Egypt, his native country.As Duchesne (op. cit., I, 331) well remarks, one cannot believe that these heretical manifestations represented all the Alexandrine Christianity. These schools, precisely because they are nothing but schools, suppose a Church, "the Great Church", as Celsus calls it; such aberration, precisely because labelled with their authors' names, testify to the existence of the orthodox tradition in the country where they originated. This tradition, from which heresies of such a power of diffusion could separate themselves without putting its very existence in jeopardy, must have been endowed with a vitality which cannot be accounted for without at least half a century of normal growth and organization under the guidance strong and vigilant bishops. We may, therefore, safely conclude as that as early as the middle decades of the first century there was in Alexandria, and probably in the neighboring nomes, or provinces, Christian communities consisting principally of Hellenistic Jews and of those pious men (phoboumenoi ton Theon) who had embraced the tenets and practices of Judaism without becoming regular proselytes. These communities must have had some numerical importance, for on the one hand the Jews were exceedingly numerous (over one million) in Egypt, and particularly in Alexandria, where they constituted two-fifths of the whole population; and on the other hand the philosophical eclecticism that generally prevailed in Alexandria at that time co-operated in favour of Christian ideas with the great doctrinal tolerance then obtaining throughout Judaism, to the extent, indeed, as Duchesne tersely puts it, that one might think like Philo or like Akiba, believe in the resurrection of the flesh or in its final annihilation, expect the Messias or ridicule that hope, philosophize like Ecclesiastes or like the Wisdom of Solomon (op. cit., I, 122). Along with this Judaizing church, whose hopes and expectations were centered in Jerusalem and the Temple, who accepted Christianity and yet continued to observe the Law, there was another Church, decidedly Gentile -- we might say, Christian -- in its character and aspirations, as well as in its practices. It is difficult to surmise what the relations of those two churches to one another were in their details. It is very probable that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by Titus, by putting an end to the hopes of many among the judaizing Church, brought them over to the Great Church, which henceforth gained rapidly in numbers and prestige and soon became the only orthodox Christian Church.

    newadvent.org/cathen/05329b.htm
     
  21. Avatar smoking revolver Valued Senior Member

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    19,083
    Cross is a sacred symbol in many cultures and by disregarding the Babylonian mythology you're making a tragic error.
    Amen comes from the word "Let it be so".
    I don't have the time for this, but I urge readers to cross check the facts implied by LuckyNumbers, because he's exaggerating them.
    The Coptic church in Egypt is indeed an old one.
     
  22. Challenger78 Valued Senior Member

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    I don't have links , but Popular mechanics does point out some of their points about the 11th of September could very well be false.
    The third part of the movie, according to Read Only, Isn't true because there is oversight, and the Federal Reserve has its own senate comittee.
     
  23. fadingCaptain are you a robot? Valued Senior Member

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    1,762
    I'd say the religious part of the movie was largely supported by evidence, though some of the conclusions are obviously controversial. The 9/11 part is rubbish. I think the new world order part has some truth to it but covered in a lot of exaggeration and paranoia. Overall, it's a good primer to start looking into the subjects in more detail.
     

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