Rid hard and put up wet too many times. It happens, AF.
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I did begin the conversation about AF’s ancient and decrepit status, Jillian.
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Long before you wrote that, Jeanne, AF was both boring us with his egotistical boasts and expressing opinions that could have come straight out of Der Stürmer.
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So, I must confess my ignorance here - what does “Deus Vult” mean?
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Deus Vult = God willing.
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Thanks. If that has the connotations I think it does, I agree with your response to it.
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I forgot to mention Zoroastrianism, one of the Oldest religions and the 1st monotheistic religion also influenced Judaism.
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Indeed, the almost pagan monotheisms are very similar. Christians have told me that they just didn’t have it quite right, but they knew the demi-god savior, was a sort of pre-cognitive kind of faith that would lead to the true son of god savior, etc. that Jesus Christ was.
I think it was the other way around.
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Christianity propounds the absurdity that a Jewish man who lived in a small province of the Roman Empire between the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius was the creator of the universe. Yes, yes. The Council of Nicea laid it down: Kevin - I mean Jesus - was “entirely human and entirely divine”. He was not an aspect of the godhead - that’s what the Modalists believe and it is “the Sabellian heresy”. He was God. He is God. Who created the universe. After dying as a human being, he rose physically from earth to a physical heaven.
If a sane, educated, adult can believe that, his/her sanity is an illusion, his/her education worthless, his/her development into maturity arrested.
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What do you mean by the “almost pagan monotheisms”?
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Good point! To believe such an absurdity definitely hinders the mind from developing fully, and from becoming fully rational. But in a shared delusion induced by generational mass hypnosis, people can convince themselves it is normal.
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Yes, or there’s the idea that Satan knew what God was going to do, so he made up “counterfeit” saviors to discredit the real one! Why not? When you’re already delusional, what’s a little stretch of the imagination?!
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Mithras, Zoraster. I was trying to figure out how to call them the saviors and sons of the god, who were referred to as the light of the god, crucified, arose, etc.
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Ah yes. That was it.
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Zoroastrianism was not monotheistic, though often said to be. Two gods - twins - one good, one evil. Here’s an outline of the belief:
https://theatheistconservative.com/2009/05/26/thus-more-or-less-spake-zarathustra
Mithras? As the Iranian top god Mithra he was one of many. In his Roman form as Mithras he was just the one in the cult itself. But the other Roman gods were acknowledged by the Mithraic cultists.
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If the Hebrew man or tribe called Abraham (20th. century BCE) invented monotheism, the idea predated even the earliest dating of Zoroaster (19th. century BCE). But Abrahamic monotheism is not the same as Judaism. Judaism is dated from Moses (13th. century BCE), who was an Egyptian prince and must surely have brought Egyptian ideas, especially ideas of law, to the development of his Hebrew followers’ monotheism into a new religion.
Two other monotheistic beliefs in the centuries before our Common Era were:
The worship of Aten, a sun god, initiated by the Pharaoh Akhenaten (14th. century BCE). The religion died with him.
The god of Greek philosophy - co-existent with the pantheon of Greek divinities. He was the Platonic “ideal” or “essence” of Being, of which there could be only one. (Plato lived in the 4th. century BCE.)
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From Pages of The Atheist Conservative website: a stab at reconstructing, in a few chapters, what happened to make an obscure religious fanatic, living in the 1st.century CE in the Roman province of Judea, into the Christian God:
The Birth and Early History of Christianity.
https://theatheistconservative.com/the-birth-and-early-history-of-christianity/
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Thanks for the correction, Jillian. It has been long that I have not read up on any of these topics. Memory has always been limited to what I need in my head at the moment. 
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