Search results

Chapter #16 8. Prince Siddhartha Gautama was called Buddha by his followers -- ca. 560 - 480 b.c.e. -- and is the founder of Buddhism. The number of Buddhist texts are endless. The earliest collection is the Tripitaka in the Pali language. In that collection is a book of sermons, the...

Chapter #15 1. Getting down to cases, The Rigveda is the earliest Hindu religious text -- the bulk of it from the mid-second-millennium b.c.e. It's a series of devotional poems. Author unknown, but a certain Lord Krishna of the late fourth millennium b.c.e. is sometimes reckoned the immediate...

Chapter #12 If someone could uncover a peer-bucking atheist who introduced her/his atheism for the first time to her/his own culture, a culture duly ignorant of conceiving of any reality without a god up to then, and who did so in tandem with a profound social reform of that culture of some...

Chapter #9 KNUTZEN Mathias Knutzen, who described himself as the first "Conscientist" in a series of path-breaking pamphlets written in German in the 1670s, wrote: "We declare that God does not exist, we deeply despise the authorities and also reject the churches with all their priests. For...

Chapter #8 Sociopathic philosophies can still exert a hold of sorts if advanced with enough charisma and cunning. But they don't tend to transform whole cultures for more than -- maybe -- a couple of centuries, at most. Those "ethics" that have longer influence than that are, sooner or later...

Chapter #7 It's time that readers view the data on all pioneering atheists for themselves. Clearly, ALL atheists as a group have the same mix of good and bad that ALL theists as a group have, as well as the general population. What I survey here instead are the (known, extant) pioneers who...

Chapter #5 My own take is that there is some degree of evidence for any number of things that may be unlikely. But the question in each case is, Is it strong evidence or poor evidence? Not all evidence is automatically strong. At the same time, even if evidence is poor, it can still be counted...

Hi susiesnooz -- I was somehow sure that I've already submitted something of my own story (quite a long one) to this board(?). But I don't seem to see where I discussed it/submitted it! If I could find it, I'd just give you a link, and that would be it. As it is, though, with some...

Only a week? ;-) Cheers, Operacast

Thanks. Very cogent and clear. Best, Operacast

Exactly! ;) If we want to see something of the lengths to which mythicists will go with their nutty ideas, I found this astonishingly loooooooong thread on the Web, revolving around the question of mythicist Jesus versus historical Jesus. Its length is positively epic! What Can We Reasonably...

Oh? And I'd like to know what you were doing.............. Operacast

So? The points I drew up seemed worthwhile in this thread. I posted these thoughts in one other place where the response was relatively tepid. Big deal. I read somewhere that 5 copies is generally considered the number at which one flirts with spamming. I'm nowhere near that, and furthermore...

I have just lodged an inquiry of the moderators here as to whether or not this is one of those forums where inquiries as to posters' alternate identities on other boards constitutes a breach of the Rules of the Road for readers posting here. I know that there are certain fora where this is...

I appreciate Snoopy's good wishes here. Thank you. If I may ==========> ===============> I agree there is an ultimate truth independent of any person revealing it. At the same time, while Daoism, just as one example, strikes most reasonably literate readers of the Tao-te-king as a...

No unique perspective, however unique, contradicts the plain likelihood that two or three other perspectives can still give accurate glimpses of something plainly factual. If one perspective can show something unique, that has no bearing whatsoever on two other images that can be equally...

No, that doesn't follow. There is a more apt analogy that works better in this case: a series of photographs of the same scene taken from different perspectives. Not a one of them is going to be false, but they are each different from all the others because the camera has been placed...

(Part 2) 6. Zarathustra is an even more shadowy figure. We know he was probably responsible for composing the Gathas central to his creed. But beyond that, scholars are not even sure of his dates, which could range anywhere from the 6th century b.c.e. back to the 12th b.c.e.! Thus, this...

I'd tend to weigh the individual _human_ factor in each case far more heavily than many others whom I know. Hence, one crucial factor that matters most to me are the earliest and least "tweaked" textual strata and what they indicate about the specific founder involved at each creed's outset...

Can't recall where I saw it, but I read one very recent blog by a Muslim reflecting that 9-11 was actually an insult to Islam and that therefore building any mosque near Ground Zero was an insult to Islam as well. Not sure if the blogger was who he claimed he was, of course (one never can be)...