Humanist Symposium 5

The Humanist Symposium is a collection of articles from a humanist point of view.

The man who lives with turtles

Richard Ogust saves endangered turtles, and has 1200 in his Manhattan apartment.
The trade in turtles, including endangered species, from Vietnam to China for food markets has been 15,000 tons per year for many years. Richard Ogust bankrupted himself caring for rescued turtles.

Carnival of the Godless 71

Aarvarkaeology hosts Carnival of the Godless 71. It is a compendium of articles about religion and atheism.

The Dirty Greek has an article about the polytheistic roots of Christianity. Here’s the start:

The Son of God was born several thousand years ago on December 25. He was described thusly: He “is spiritual light contending with spiritual darkness, and through his labors the kingdom of darkness shall be lit with heaven’s own light; the Eternal will receive all things back into his favor, the world will be redeemed to God. The impure are to be purified, and the evil made good” (Plato, Philo, and Paul, p. 15). He was depicted as an infant on the lap of his mother in art, and one of these depictions can be found in the catacombs of Rome. As an adult, he was a traveling teacher and healer, and he had 12 disciples.

His birth was celebrated yearly on December 25, as was his resurrection, which happened 3 days after his death and entombment. His disciples “formed an organized church, with a developed hierarchy. They possessed the ideas of Mediation, Atonement, and a Savior, who is human and yet divine, and not only the idea, but a doctrine of the future life. They had a Eucharist, and a Baptism, and other curious analogies might be pointed out between their system and the church of Christ” (The Christian Platonists, p. 240).

This story sounds familiar to all of you, I’m sure. However, it’s not the story of Jesus that I’m telling. It is the story of Mithras. Franz Cumont wrote The Mysteries of Mithra (full readable version here) in 1903….

Tertullian, a church father, wrote “The Devil, whose business it is to pervert the truth, mimicks the exact circumstances of the Divine Sacraments, in the Mysteries of idols. He himself baptises some that is to say, his believers and followers; he promises forgiveness of sins from the Sacred Fount, and thereby initiates them into the religion of Mithras: thus he marks on the forehead his own soldiers: there he celebrates the oblation of bread: he brings in the symbol of the Resurrection, and wins the crown with the sword.”

Tertullian and the early Christians, then, were so painfully aware that their beliefs were so similar to those of the Dionysus/Bacchus/Mithras followers that they came up with an explanation – Satan himself created these stories before Jesus was born in order to confuse those who might otherwise become Christians.

Dirty Dog points out that Mithraism might have picked up these beliefs from Christianity. But I understand that Mithras arrived early in Rome, brought back by Roman soldiers, and Paul developed Christianity as an urban religion in Rome, so I think it went the other way.