Stephen said
Suppose the opposite is true, and the original experiences were not that powerful (or at least different people present remembered them differently), but the stories that developed from them were?  

This is precisely my view of how Christianity developed.    The Jesus of History was a pretty standard apocalyptic preacher.  It was his followers who were the creative ones, especially Mark and Paul.  The Jesus of Faith was created by generations of followers, the Jesus of History almost completely obscured in the process. Almost.

Most of us have not had powerful religious/mystical experiences.

I have had religious/mystical experiences all my life.  The interesting part is that they continued even after I stopped believing.  Consciousness is biochemistry.  Change your biochemistry and you change your consciousness.  You can train yourself to have these experiences or you can have them spontaneously.   The Buddhist sees the bright light and is filled with peace and calls it  Avalokita or Kuan Yin, the Boddhisatva of Infinite Compassion.  The Christian sees the bright light and is filled with peace and calls it Christ or Mary or the Holy Spirit.   Both are having the same experience, a human experience, but interpreting it through a pre-existing cultural lens.    Just call me the Mystic Atheist.  Heh heh heh. I see the bright light and feel the peace and call it…

 

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.    

-Rumi                       

Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense, Stephen.  He was a mediocrity, but his followers were geniuses?  Who picked the followers?  He did.  And they attracted still other people of talent.  

He had nothing to offer them in any material sense.  So he must have been incredibly compelling.  And when he died the most degrading death anyone could back then–they went on believing in him.

But the really weird thing is–he’s the one who died first.  Nobody died for him when he was alive.  And we’re told he didn’t want them to.  Unusual for a cult leader.  

You keep telling yourself he was nothing, but they’ll be talking about him in a thousand years.  In less than one lifetime, most of the well-known atheists you’ve met will be minor footnotes.  

Also, that poem sucks.  Do I even have to find good material for you to work with?  Here ya go.  

🙂

This is an old line–“Jesus just copied off somebody else’s paper.”  Everybody does.  You could say the same of Plato (and Socrates).  That isn’t what originality means, saying something nobody ever said before in any form.  Jesus was powerfully original, because of the way he approached and expressed the ideas he used.  There was nobody else like him, not even John the Baptist.  (Which is why John is mainly remembered in the gospels).  

The Osiris ref is weird–he wasn’t a real person, and there is no set of ethics associated with Osiran myth–it’s a different type of religious belief, older, more localized, less easily translated to other cultures and times.  I don’t think you believe the pseudohistory that says the gospels were copying Egyptian mythology.  So you’re responding to what I said as if I think he’s God, when you know damned well I don’t.  Weak response.  You really are trying to make Jesus smaller, precisely because he loomed so large in your early life, and because the Jesus you were exposed to really was a myth.  Not my problem.  

Jesus was very real, very human, and we know far more about him and what he believed than we ever will about the people who created the Egyptian religion.  And anyway, we will be discussing Egyptian religion a thousand years from now (if we’re still around by then), just like we discuss Greek mythology, so what’s your point?  

Copy/Paste.  It ain’t hard, man.  But see, I know what to look for.  I’ve studied at the feet of many masters.  Your repertoire seems far more–limited.  The problem with fundamentalists is that they tend to keep the same absolutist yes/no black/white patterns of belief, even after they leave fundamentalism.  You lack flexibility.  Have you tried yoga?  

My problem with that poem is the poem itself–not what it says, but the tedious way it says it.  Literature is far more my wheelhouse than religion.  And that, to me, is somebody trying to say he’s not religious when he clearly is.  

😉

Talent is hard to measure.  So is will power.  (So is achievement, and posterity often comes in with a very different verdict than contemporaries reached.)  

Maybe the person who seemed less talented was actually the true prodigy, but his/her talent needed more development.  Maybe the one who seemed to be a wunderkind was just more facile–a vein lying close to the surface, easy to tap into, quick to run out.  But the opposite could just as easily be true.  The proof is in the work–whatever it is.  

Who do you think was original?  Please tell me.

And then I’ll tell you all the things that person got from somebody else.

The Golden Rule was spontaneously come across by many different people, most of whom we don’t remember, but Jesus was the first in his culture that we know of who made it positive–not “don’t do to others what you find unpleasant” but “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”  

He’s extending the ideals of Judaism–to the point where it’s no longer about being Jewish.  It’s about being a good person.  One’s faith is only proven out through actions, to the point where actions constitute faith, and faith without works is dead (from James, not the gospels, but that’s very likely to be much more directly from Jesus’ line of thought than anything Paul wrote, since Paul is much more about faith than works).  

If Jesus wasn’t original, nobody ever was.  And maybe that’s true.  Maybe originality doesn’t exist, at least in the sense we foolishly conceive it.  Since the German romantic movement, we’ve been enthralled with the notion of the True Original, divine genius.  We used to think of creativity much more in collective terms.  Jesus wasn’t just this guy out in the desert having visions–he was talking to people, learning as much as teaching.  

Scoff all you like.  It’s really all you know how to do.  So original.

😀

And that’s much better than calling him ‘a religious fanatic’ (useless words from a historian’s POV).  

Jesus wasn’t out to create a religion called ‘Christianity’–he literally never used the term.  Do we agree on that?  Assuming so, then it’s kind of a ‘duh’ moment to say Jesus wasn’t the creator of something he wasn’t trying to create, that he never believed would be needed, since the Kingdom would make all organized religion pointless.  

It’s equally true to say Buddha didn’t create Buddhism.  He, like Jesus, was an innovative teacher, trying to reform religious practices that already existed in his society, and seeking to transcend them–Buddhism was built on the foundation of what we now call Hinduism.  It became a new religion because it diverged too far from what the earlier tradition could accommodate, and the people who made that happen mainly did so after Buddha was gone.  Buddha certainly would not have approved of people worshiping idols fashioned in his image (why are many of them so fat?), but they still do, all over the world.  

And to take it even further, did Charles Darwin ever intend for there to be a school of thought referred to as ‘Darwinism’?  That was really more the doing of people like Huxley (‘Darwin’s Bulldog’), who took ideas Darwin meant to be discussed seriously among scientists (a gentleman’s club at the time, which is why Wallace was largely boxed out), and made them a weapon to be used against Victorian society–before long, it became an excuse for rich white men to say they were evolutionarily superior to the poor and non-whites–still a very potent idea today, as you can clearly see.  Not at all what Darwin intended, but it went on in spite of his objections, and Social Darwinism, filtered through proto-fascist thinkers who misinterpreted his ideas, ended up forming the basis of Fascism, much more than poor Nietzsche (whose ideas also got turned into a system of philosophy he wouldn’t have acknowledged as his own).  

All originals, all innovative thinkers.  But none of them were systematizers, institutionalists.  The fact remains, without the memory of their ideas and the fascinating stories built around their lives (heavily mythologized, even in the case of Darwin–because the real story of how he developed his ideas wasn’t romantic enough), the people who built the systems named after them wouldn’t have had the materials to work with.  Visionaries don’t tend to be very good social engineers.  And social engineers rarely have a compelling vision of their own.  

Paul could never have inspired a religion on his own.  He needed a Jesus.  Jesus never wanted a Paul.  And this is how history works.  The same patterns, recurring over and over, with endless variations.  

“I don’t have to explain why what you said is inaccurate, nor do I have to justify my opinion, which is as good as anyone else’s, and that’s why I can go against almost the entire body of scholarly opinion and say Jesus got arrested in the Temple courtyard, and nobody remembered it.”  🙄

(For the record, this is not meant to be a literal quotation from Stephen.  It is sarcastic paraphrasing.  I should not have to make this clear, it should be obvious, but I’ve learned it’s a bad idea to take it for granted people on this forum will get sarcasm, even though they try to use it themselves.)

I don’t mind you disagreeing with me, but do you have to be so boringly predictable about the way you do it?

You aren’t even making an argument here.  You are stating as a fact something that is almost inherently subjective–originality is not a fact to be proven or disproven.  It’s something people see or not–something people argue about, all the time.  But if nobody saw it about Jesus, why did so many people you do think were original gravitate around his memory?  Can you point to other instances in history where this is known to have happened? 

If Jesus had, in fact, taught that the Messiah would suffer and die, meaning him, would that make him original in your view?  Because we do have evidence that he taught this–and that his disciples were appalled by that teaching. 

Regardless of whether he really said that, he did suffer and die.  We can be damn sure his disciples were appalled by that. 

If you are correct (and it’s possible, and nothing original about that, lots of people have said it already) that they only decided the Messiah was supposed to suffer and die after it happened–how is that original?  They were just reacting to real-life events. If Jesus hadn’t suffered and died, they wouldn’t have said it.  And they had clearly decided he was Messiah before he suffered and died.

What do you think originality is?