Simple question, no tricks, don't care what you believe.

Go!

ETA: Please play nice. I ask the question because I want to hear some ideas that I've heard here before, but have had no success finding through the search/archive search function.

Zoroastrianism.

God himself of course

Moses, author of the Pentateuch?

Revealed by, you guessed it.......................God.

God chose Abraham to be the father of the Jewish and thus eventually the Christian faith.

Cloudy today with a 100% chance of shit storm!

hmmm....

Arfcom assured me that all of the Apostles were deists.

Probably came from the same place the rest of these guys came from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deities

FPNI



 

I don't think you accurately worded your question to voice the question you were thinking. You answered your question in the thread title. The idea for the Christian God was outlined in the Old and New Testaments, originating from God Himself. Or if you don't believe in Christianity, it originated from the authors of the several books. Were you instead asking where monotheism originated?

Please explain. Never heard this term before.

Chernobyl II in 3...2...1

The Bible is the word of God; there are no "ideas" in it.

From the Jewish one

 

Ummm...




Pretty sure God can have ideas, too.

No, I've heard it proposed here that the God of Israel (and thus the Christian God) was co-opted from other, older Levantine cultures. It seems like this proposal was based around the common name "El", which could be used as a god generically or as the patriarch of the Canaanite pantheon and as the name of a god in a bunch of other cultures. This view seems to come up in various religious threads, but never in a thread dedicated to discussing that. Thus, my weak search fu does not allow me to find this idea among the bazillions of religious thread topics in GD's sordid past.

I ask the question because I want to hear and understand this idea.

Why did your god make himself/herself known to only a small group of people in a single small area of the world?

The Chinese, the Inca, the American Indians, etc. never got the memo...

and for posting in GD.

Where did the idea of America as presented in the Declaration of Independence come from?

This thread will produce a civil debate I'm sure!

Aten

The middle east is the crossroads of the world.  Want to move from Europe, Africa, or Asia to one of the other two, you will pass through the middle east.

A hard concept to understand is that the Jewish people were essential to the spread of the Gospel.  The Jews were at ground zero.  They made the most powerful empire hate them.  In the meantime, Christ was born and Christianity became established in the middle east.

Being a part of the Roman Empire allowed Jews and Christians to spread to the known world via Roman infrastructure and sea travel.  

When the Diaspora came, it scattered Christians and Jews alike all over the place.

God knew what was going to happen.  Christ was begotten and not made.  The triune god has always existed.  Time as we understand it came later on.  God wanted to have a one-on -one relationship with his creation.  Couldn't do that with apes, so he created man.....who is created in god's image....and god is spirit.

Man messed it up once man discovered free will.  God cannot be in the presence of sin and vv.

Jesus purpose from the very get go was to pay the price for all sin.  But god had to first get back in touch with mankind yet again.  He chose Abraham because Abraham had come to the conclusion that there was only one god and that god was omnipotent.  God let Abraham know that he was indeed the god that Abraham had come to realize.

Thus a monotheistic religion for the purpose of keeping in touch with a triune god was born.

If it had been done anywhere else, it would not have spread as god wished it to.

Your god seems more concerned with playing games.

Zoroastrianism was/is an offshoot of Hinduism. Hinduism is a huge pantheon of thousands of gods with a few major gods and is super old. Much older than any "western" beliefs. A dude named Zoroaster/Xoroaster basically pioneered the monotheistic deity concept as being an omnipotent and the one true god. This was in the Persian lands and became a very influential religion from India to the Middle East and up to Southern Russia. The ideas of Zoroastrianism mixed into the local polytheism in the Middle East, along with the brief but equally influential Egyptian experiments with monotheism. There is evidence that the early Hebrews were polytheistic and these outside religions were adapted into their belief systems. Also, politically the different Hebrew tribes were separated by which of the many gods they claimed as the most powerful. Eventually one tribe "united" the different gods and tribes under the war god Yahweh and declared him to be the one, true god.

There are fascinating books on the subject of Zoroastrian/Egyptian influence onto early Judaism as well as the (for lack of a better word) evolution of the early Hebrew system into Monotheism.
ETA;
This is a halfway decent video that explains some of this. I can't embed, so clicky powers are required.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZY2eeozdo8

From God

You know, I asked the question in the spirit of honest desire for ideas. I am actually seeking to understand an idea that I've heard Arfcom's resident non-believers talk about.

However, as usual, you have barged in with no useful input whatsoever. You only come to these threads because you enjoy being an annoyance and a pest. Congratulations. Mission accomplished.

not really. it has some common roots/concepts with proto-hinduism a zillion years ago but it is quite distinct from hinduism. to say that it is or more so still an offshoot is quite incorrect.

Semantics. Zoroastrianism began as an offshoot of Hinduism. It became very different soon after. It currently has little connection to Hinduism, so you are correct.

If you look at Genesis, then it's plain to see that the concept of God was in play long before the creation of the Jewish faith.  Many other cultures that are older than Judaism have a common thread of God.  Some believe in multiple deities, others are mono-theistic.  So it's safe to assume that some folks wandering around the deserts of what now is the Middle East were familiar with our concept of God for quite some time before the founding of the Hebrew nation.  Genesis doesn't dive into this all that much because it's essentially a history of the Jewish people rather than a History of the World.  There are plenty of historical and scientific facts that are not discussed in any way shape or form in Scripture.  

In before the 2

NT
From the dudes that hung out with Him. They wrote down what they witnessed.
Those writings are the NT.


Saint Peter

This, except Hebrews are an older people than the Israelites. Genesis refers to Abram as "Abram the Hebrew" long before he fathered Isaac. Essentially, the Israelites' cultural and ethnic history is rooted in Mesopotamia. Abram came from Ur of the Chaldeans, which makes Abram a Sumerian (or something--I might be wrong about that). Then, Abram wanders to southern Turkey and finally into the land of Canaan. He and the three following generations live there, procreating all the while. It wasn't until Abraham's great-grandchildren that we have Israelites, or children of Israel (Jacob). Therefore, the Israelites are effectively Canaanites. Hence, the God of the Bible is necessarily the same God that people knew throughout the Middle- and Near-East, including all the land of the Fertile Crescent.

In essence, I believe that the argument that the nation of Israel "stole" God from other regional cultures agrees perfectly with what the Bible teaches. I just want to make sure I understand that argument.

 

Abrahamic religions are attributed to the Hebrew Bible, Torah, etc.  This is pretty much where the single god comes from.  

Pretty much all religion is based in one way or another on ancient Egyptian religion.

Ah, yes, well...


Welcome to GD!

I hope your jimmies weren't rustled too harshly.

We will simply have to disagree.

PR and Marketing men. The campaign was obviously extremely successful.

You rang my bell on that one.  Hebrews do pre-date Judaism.  I don't buy the "stealing" argument.  God set aside a group of people and gave them very strict laws that set them apart from the rest of the population.  No doubt there were others who "knew" of God but their worship and service to Him weren't part of the Jewish narrative that eventually gave us Christianity.  I think we agree more than disagree but as in most things the Devil's in the details.  



 

Genesis 11 links Abraham's genealogy back to Shem, the son of Noah.  Genesis 5 links Noah's genealogy back to Adam.

But there is no doubt that Abraham was raised in a culture influenced by Chaldeans or Sumerians.  Yet religious beliefs regarding God could go back to Adam's relationship with God.

Mithraism....says exactly the same things as Christianity. Its also the religion of Tarsus......You know as in Paul of Tarsus. When Paul went back to Tarsus to preach the only difference he could make was that a 'diety' gave up his life instead of a bull hence Christianity was better.

Also the god Osiris from Egypt died ... was put in a tomb...had the stone rolled away and rose from the dead. Ironically Moses was raised in Egypt and knew this story well just like he did the book of the dead chapter 25 where is says " I did not commit murder.... I did not steal... I did not covet my neighbors wife".....etc

I think we do agree just about 100%, and any disagreement comes from the way I worded things (if I'm reading things right). When I say "stole" I am using the language that non-believers used in that argument I've heard before, which is intended to demonstrate that Jehovah is fictional.

The way I see it, Israel didn't "steal" anything--they simply continued to worship Jehovah, whom all of the other cultures had known by a different name that is also recorded in the Bible, and some had worshiped faithfully, since the beginning. For example:


Certainly, Melchizedek was a Canaanite and not related to Abraham. The name of the Canaanite father-god and creator was "El". Well, as it turns out, the Hebrew word for "God" in this verse is "'El". Certainly, Melchizedek worshiped the same God as both David and the author of Hebrews as is evident in those men's understanding that Melchizedek was a forerunner of the righteous priests of God:



Now, listen to what God Himself told Moses centuries later in Exodus 6:



Get this--in this passage, the word "Lord" is written in most Bibles in small-caps both times. That means that it represents the Hebrew name, Yehovah, which we Romanize as Jehovah. So, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did not know God by the name Jehovah. By what name had they known Him?

They knew Him as "God Almighty," which in Hebrew is "'El" Almighty. How 'bout that! The first reference to God in the passage, "And God spoke to Moses...", uses the Hebrew "'Elohiym", which is a plural derivative of "'El". Plural, as in Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

I guess the point is this. According to the Bible narrative, all who currently live are descended from Adam through Noah. There was one language, one nation, for quite a long time. Men knew of, and some worshiped faithfully, Jehovah, though they did not know Him by that name. They knew Him as El. Then, God confused the speech of the various sons of Noah at Babel. They went from there and settled all over the place. Over the generations, many remembered the one God, El, but they corrupted His worship. They, as men are wont to do, added their own, additional deities while retaining God as the mightiest of them. They also worshiped Him according to ways that they devised themselves. After all, God had not yet given any instruction on how to worship Him.

So, while you might say that they knew *of* God, they did not *know God*. That would be reserved for God's chosen nation, the Israelites. They would know God much later through the law and the prophets. But remember this: according to the Bible, God did not reveal himself to the nation of Israel until after they left Egypt. Yes, God had revealed Himself to Jacob (Israel) and his sons, but only in the context of keeping the promise to Abraham (you will receive land, etc.). There was no law until centuries later. Israel went into bondage in Egypt, and during those 400+ years, God was silent. It was not until God spoke to Moses that He revealed Himself, both to Israel and to Egypt, in the Exodus. It was then that God gave the law through Moses.

The story goes on from there. The Israelites, after they conquered Canaan, did exactly what all of those other, pagan nations had done. They made idols of bulls and calfs, which were common Canaanite representations of El. They worshiped the Ba'als, whose names are derivatives of El. In other words, they forgot what God had taught them about Himself and, in do doing, corrupted their worship of God. Thus, God punished them in a series of captivities in Assyria, Babylon and Persia. Canaan would never again belong wholly to Israel.

Then comes Christ and the completion of God's revelation to man.

God has always been the same God, whether man has called Him El, Yahweh, Jehovah or God. As non-believers delight in telling the faithful, the archaeological record clearly shows that, before there was a nation of Israel, many ancient cultures worshiped a father-creator-god whose name was, or was based on, the same name by which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob knew God. The archaeological record furthermore agrees that the worship of the one, true God--frequently named 'El in the Old Testament--was corrupted by all of the nations to include gods that man had invented as well as worship in ways that God never commanded or desired. In other words, the archaeological record entirely agrees with the Genesis account of how man knew God before the nation of Israel.

God, the Great "I AM", has always been (hence, the name!). Man's knowledge of Him has always been limited to what He chose to reveal, and even in those revelations, man's knowledge of God has waxed and waned over the ages. It's not God who has changed, but man's perception and knowledge of God that has changed. That's what the Bible teaches, and that's what the archaeological record confirms.

God of the Christian Bible comes from God of the Jewish Bible.

the desert

I love these threads....IN for the inevitable shit storm, butthurt, and eventual lock