Beware of Satan's false illumination. When people say, "I am spiritual but not religious" they are actually on the path towards

@sarabi that isn’t true the least bit. They are two different entities entirely and always have been and started at different time periods. The only truth in that are some holidays are pagan origin. Pagans love to
self proclaim that religion came from paganism . which is wild considering paganism is one of the younger religions in the entire timeline

@DeluxedEdition there are literally many deites before Jesus with the exact same story. Osiris for ex. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus-Osiris

Hermes, Asclepius, Serapis, and Zeus etc etc

@sarabi “ Osiris for example” and then you reference Wikipedia 🙄

@DeluxedEdition is Wikipedia not credible? I used just an example, you can read about dying and rising deities on your own

@sarabi You are merely repeating the same tired lie that many atheists, neo-pagans and other disbelievers of Christianity have repeated ad naseum. Such ideas have become very popular because of films like Zeitgeist. No one questions these ideas, though, and no one actually checks the sources for these ideas, because there are no legitimate sources. They just parrot them, because they have an agenda.

We are told Jesus is just one of many dying and rising gods present in history, and that every culture has their own saviour figure with stories that are exactly the same as the story of Jesus in every way. Since we apparently have stories of gods that predate Jesus who have the exact same outline and ministry as he did, it’s suggested that the story of Jesus is a knock-off of pagan stories that come before him.

This idea could not be farther from the truth. As Bart Ehrman, atheist professor of Religious Studies at UNC, has said:

“The alleged parallels between Jesus and the “pagan” savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions).”

When you dig deeper you will find that these “parallels” are made up to such an extent as to be simply embarrassing. Jesus is not a knock-off of pagan god stories, and this is a basic fact of history. Let’s take a quick look at Mithra, Dionysus, and Horus, all of whom are claimed to have born of a virgin, killed, buried, and resurrected from the dead.

Lets start with the one you brought up. Horus.

Horus had no virgin birth. Isis had sex with Osiris after reassembling his body parts which were torn apart and scattered over Egypt. As egyptologist and professor at the university of Arizona Dr. Richard Wilkinson has written,

“Through her magic Isis revivified the sexual member of Osiris and became pregnant by him, eventually giving birth to their child, Horus.”

Historian and professor Françoise Dunand writes,

“AFTER HAVING SEXUAL INTERCOURSE, IN THE FORM OF A BIRD, WITH THE DEAD GOD SHE RESTORED TO LIFE, SHE GAVE BIRTH TO A POSTHUMOUS SON, HORUS.”

There exists not a single record of Horus ever even dying. Like Mithra, we are left to wonder how such a figure could be called a “dying and rising god”. Since he didn’t die, this means He wasn’t buried in a tomb or resurrected from the dead.


Mithra

Mithra had absolutely no virgin birth. In fact, Mithra was not born in a literal sense, he emerged out of a rock. Mirtha was only born metaphorically, not literally. Mithra even emerged out of this rock as an adult, not as a baby. Mithra has no real mother, no virgin birth, no manger.

Mithra was never killed, let alone crucified. As Mithraic scholar Gordon Richard says there “Is no death of Mithras” (3). If he didn’t die, that means there was no “last supper”, he wasn’t crucified, buried, or raised on the third day. If he didn’t die, he wasn’t resurrected.

Emerged from a rock as an adult, no death on a cross (or at all), and no resurrection from the dead. Yet, this pagan deity is still brought up all the time as being the god whom Jesus was plagiarized are amalgamated from. Not to mention, most of what we know about Mithra comes after Jesus at the end of the first century, meaning Mithraism might have even drawn influence from early Christianity.

Dionysus

Dionysus also was not born from a virgin mother. There are several different mothers for this god depending on which source you read, but the most common story is that Dionysus was born from Zeus having sex with Semele:

“And Semele, daughter of Kadmos was joined with him [Zeus] in love and bare him a splendid son, joyous Dionysos,–a mortal woman an immortal son. And now they both are gods.” – Hesiod, Theogony. 940 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or 7th B.C.)

Nothing virginal about this story, or any of the others pertaining to the birth of Dionysus.

Dionysus died, not on a cross, by being torn up into a bunch of pieces by the titans. He was then boiled in a pot, and then eaten by them. There are at least 6 different accounts of what happens to his remains after that. The only thing this has in common with the death of Jesus is physical pain, which is so general and common in death accounts as to offer no value to this discussion.

While most restoration accounts of Dionysus are too ambiguous to matter, there is one story that reads: “Dionysus was deceived by the Titans, and expelled from the throne of Jupiter, and torn in pieces by them, and his remains being afterwards put together again, he returned as it were once more to life, and ascended to heaven.”

Pretty close to the story of Jesus. The problem is that this source, Contra Celsum, was written by the early church father Origen in 248AD, over 200 years after the story of Jesus had already been established and circulating. This is a post-Christ resurrection story. If anything, it may have been the Dionysus cults that adopted this idea from Christianity.

As historian Gary Habermas has said:

“I DON’T KNOW ANYBODY WHO THINKS THAT DIONYSUS IS PRE-CHRISTIAN, NOT THE RESURRECTION PORTION.”

Historian J.Z. Smith famously said in his essay in the Encyclopedia of Religion,

“The category of dying and rising Gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts…

THERE IS NO UNAMBIGUOUS INSTANCE IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS OF A DYING AND RISING DEITY.”

Trigge Mettinger, a Swedish scholar and former professor at Lund University, has authored one of the most comprehensive works ever written in the field of dying and rising gods and its relationship to Christianity called ‘Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East’. He concludes his book by the following:

“There is, as far as I am aware, no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world. While studied with profit against the background of Jewish resurrection belief, the faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions.”


Before repeating talking points, you might want to actually do research on the subject.

@sarabi As an addendum, it is also absurd and not well thought out to say that Christianity borrows much from paganism because God explicitly condemns paganism and their false system in the Bible. He condemns what almost all pagans have done and do, which is sun worship, idolatry. This is also why astrotheology is absurd:

Deuteronomy 4:19, "And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which theLordthy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven."

Deuteronomy 17:2-5, "If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which theLordthy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of theLordthy God, in transgressing his covenant,
And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded;
And it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain, that such abomination is wrought in Israel:
Then shalt thou bring forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing, unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with stones, till they die."

Further condemnation of paganism in the Bible:

Deuteronomy Chapter 18

9 When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.

10 There shall not be found among youany onethat maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire,orthat useth divination,oran observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch,

11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

12 For all that do these thingsarean abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

13 Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God.

14 For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered thee so to do.

Romans 1 goes into it also,

23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.

Pagans worship the creation and nature. God forbids this.

Pagans worship false gods. The God of the Bible says thou shalt have no other god's before me.

@SW-User sorry bro, you lost me at you quoting "facts" from a fictitious, heavily edited, rewritten, and not completely translated book such as the bible.

As for the research, as an ex christian, I have done it and read about other religions and saw the obvious thing you're avoiding.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_in_comparative_mythology

Farewell now.

@sarabi It is ironic how you talk about me avoiding when you avoided everything I have written. You're avoiding everything historians and history says about these religions and figures, which I've provided many credible sources for. You choose to mindlessly repeat speculations from films like Zeitgeist and share a source from Wikipedia. You have nothing, and you demonstrate that you just desperately don't want Christianity to be true.

@SW-User
I’m pretty certain that the early pagans didn’t give a shit about Christianity.
Most were no doubt converted by the edge of a sword.
And you have nothing in which to show it actually is true. As a wise man said : only one religion can be right, but all of them can be wrong.