Christianity as Antiquity

“Christianity as antiquity.-- When we hear the ancient bells growling on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This, for a jew, crucified two thousand years ago, who said he was God's son? The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed - whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions - is perhaps the most ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god; fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and ignominy of the cross -- how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things are still believed?”

It's very interesting that a great many philosophers state the obvious. Therefore, their insights are profound...Yet obvious at the same time. Or maybe not obvious...But common sensical in a way that is perhaps too profound for most, and thus makes it less obvious. I don't understand how a single religion, and not even the oldest, could have mesmerized the imaginations of people for so long that it is accepted as the irrefutable truth. Nietzsche says of Christianity and its spiritual tenets, “The fact the claim is believed- whereas one is otherwise so strict in examining pretensions” is an unthinkable hypocrisy. I don't disagree. “A god who begets children with a mortal woman” is a recurring theme is almost every mythology around the world. Yet stories of Hercules are relegated to fiction. Creation stories, dubbed “Myths” also exists from around the world. For example, in the Roman writer Ovid's Metamorphses, in the First Book after an Adam and Eve-like pair named Deucalion and Pyrrha have suffered a flood of Biblical proportions:

“They [descend] the steps, covered their heads and loosened their clothes, and threw the stones needed behind them. The stones, and who would believe it if it were not for ancient tradition, began to lose their rigidity and hardness, and after a while softened, and once softened acquired new form. Then after growing, and ripening in nature, a certain likeness to a human shape could be vaguely seen, like marble statues at first inexact and roughly carved. The earthy part, however, wet with moisture, turned to flesh; what was solid and inflexible mutated to bone; the veins stayed veins; and quickly, through the power of the gods, stones the man threw took on the shapes of men, and women were remade from those thrown by the woman.” 

 

This passage explains how, after the Flood, Deucalion and Pyrrah create more human beings by "Throwing the stones of their mother behind the back". 

I will admit that I count among Ovid's Metamorphoses one of the earliest recollections of "Religious experiences" of my youth. I knew of the Bible, but the work of Ovid and other similar tales like the Epic of Gilgamesh really opened my mind to the powerful imagery of the creation of the earth and the life of early man that is found in all cultures. 

One tribe in Africa may have hundreds or thousands of such tales or revisions upon an original tale. According to the Boshongo(A Bantu tribe): 

"In the beginning there was only darkness, water, and the great god Bumba. One day Bumba, in pain from a stomach ache, vomited up the sun. The sun dried up some of the water, leaving land. Still in pain, Bumba vomited up the moon, the stars, and then some animals: the leopard, the crocodile, the turtle, and, finally, some men, one of whom, Yoko Lima was white like Bumba." For more stories, http://www.mythome.org/creatafr.html .

The point is that all of the scholarship that is given to academia, especially the experimental methods of Science, is not given to Christianity. Perhaps to its history as a religious institution, but not to its spirituality. We accept that other religions, though we respect them, are largely based upon pseudoscience; Based on things that could have never been, although they make good material for Sci Fi/Fantasy. But Christianity is always considered infallible.