you know, this topic has gone completely berserk, even for an offtopic forum in
a 3D renderer site.  I feel unable to follow and counter every little argument
the CSI men come up with.  I'm alone fighting against fierce fiery tongues who,
despite losing hours on end analysing til the last detail down to the literary,
historic or logical aspects and contradictions of the Bible, seem to miss the
Message.

I'll pray for your souls, though... :)

Patrick Elliott <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote:
> its ***impossible*** to
> reconcile every god that ever existed, and which people claim perform(s)
> miracles with the Christian God. If nothing else, the Bible itself makes
> it absolutely clear that all those other gods, even if they do perform
> them, is *not* the god of the Bible.

I was not comparing JHVH to Ra, Zeus or anything.  Just stating that, regardless
of the different divine personas the pagans applied to represent the forces of
nature, the one true God is the one who really rules over the many different
forces of nature.

> How better to kill two
> bird with one stone than a) declare a religion that is so new and
> relatively unknown to be the true one, assign one of your own family
> members to head the local version, set up a council to sort through all
> the legends, stories, etc., and find stuff that is useful to you,
> convince at least "some" of the Jews you are fighting that Titus Flavius
> is the second coming, thus removing *another* problem, blame them for
> the death of the savior, so that any still around are hated even more
> than before, and so on.
>
> You want to know why Christianity *succeeded*? Because it was the only
> one that the Roman Emperors had near absolute control over, undermined
> the power and will to fight of those who where, at the time, there worst
> enemies, and which, because they controlled it, could be written to
> support any idea they wanted. No other religion of the time period was
> sufficiently unknown, malleable, and lacking in a powerful, entrenched,
> priesthood, which the ruling families couldn't have gotten rid of, or
> subverted enough to control them. After all, declaring the emperor a god
> didn't get rid of all those other religions. Building a new one, then
> later telling people that all the others where false, did. Its certainly
> what I might have considered, in their position. Not that it did them
> much good, because as soon as the idiots in their own families started
> believing the BS they became more concerned with who was committing sins
> than maintaining a military or defending their borders, and *poof* no
> more empire.

Bravo!  You're a true CSI!  You've just made "Da Vinci's Code" look like a bunch
of puerile assumptions.

Now, there's an old portuguese saying that I think apply here: "Deus escreve
certo por linhas tortas/God writes right by twisted lines".  There certainly is
something of Machiavelli in the way God works...

I'm off.

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