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xChrizOwnz wrote: However, my mom's to-be-husband gave me this question which I cannot come up to an answer to:
Where can you trace Christianity back to:
I tried to keep on telling him that it was likely Greece. However he said the Christian god can not be traced back to any time or anything of that sort. Where would you trace something like that back into. More like; what's the oldest true mention of the Judaistic faith. Who wrote that? And why, if you have a guess.
This is called an argument from ignorance. "We don't know, therefore X assertion is true."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
This is a matter of history, and it's completely irrelevant.
It doesn't matter if you can or can not trace something back to its first mention.
If we couldn't figure out exactly where the myth of the Tooth fairy came from, would that mean the tooth fairy must be true?
Of course not.
It's history, things get lost all of the time. Particularly word and myth origins. They get lost because they migrated from culture to culture through trade, and there's no surviving written record of most of these things.
You know how dinosaur fossils work, right? You have to get lucky to find one. The dinosaur had to die in the right place and time, get buried in silt, etc. and have its bones mineralized. It's hard to find a well preserved fossil.
It's the same thing for ancient texts (when they were ever written down, which wasn't often, because most of it was oral tradition).
Just because there are missing pieces (ignorance), doesn't mean somebody's assertions are true.
That's how you answer that one.
If you want to know, though:
The Christian god traces back only to Saul of tarsus, who was Roman, and 'made the whole thing up'.
He invented Christianity loosely based around the teachings of a Jewish sect, that may or may not have been led by a real Yeshua (Jesus), whom we know almost nothing about because the vast majority of the life story and ministry is obviously fabricated through retellings, from person to person (do you know the game "telephone"?).
Yeshua never wrote anything that we have, and it's not clear who he was or if he existed. He probably did in some sense (possibly as multiple people), but we don't have any evidence to that end.
Now the Jewish god, YHWH, was a very different character, and that traces back about 600 years earlier (the story of Moses is most likely a fabrication), before which the Jewish people, who hailed from Canaan, were henotheistic (believed in many gods, worshiped one; to roughly a thousand years back), and then earlier fully polytheistic (they believed in and worshiped a bunch of gods).
YHWH's wife was Asherah, and YHWH's previous name for the Canaanite Israelites was
El (You know how in Greek and Roman mythology gods have two names? E.g. Greek
Zeus became Roman
Jupiter). There are numerous references to YHWH being El in scripture.
More about YHWH:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
Here's an interesting article on some of the archaeological links:
http://contradictionsinthebible.com/are ... -same-god/
The name YHWH probably either came from another region, just as did the Roman god Jupiter, brought by a particular cult (a possible historical version of Moses), or was shortened from a phrase meaning something like "El the creator".
You can read more about El here, who is an earlier god with different stories, from which YHWH evolved:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)
When does one god become another? Were do you stop tracing it, and decide that's the end of the road? Because you'll have a harder time following the lineage as it goes back further.
It's like asking what the first fish was. Animals, like gods, evolve over time, and they do so pretty gradually. There's no animal you can really call the first fish, but eventually you get to something that looks very unlike the things we understand today to be fish.
xChrizOwnz wrote:Question 2:
The good old "...he knows the reason for death, suffering, and more." argument. How can I fight against this argument. It's a very well guarded argument (although it breaks the rules of logic as a whole). How could someone get against this repetitive circular-y reasoning argument.
If somebody breaks the rules of logic, it is not a valid argument. Simply dismiss it, and explain how it isn't logical.
Just because you can come up with absurd ad hoc explanations for things doesn't make those things true. You can rationalize any opposition somebody may have to the flying spaghetti monster too, with complicated excuses, and appealing to ignorance.
If somebody isn't presenting a logical argument, they aren't presenting an argument.
If the discussion is not to be bound by the rules of logic, present this simple and irrefutable disproof of god:
Banana + squirrel / cucumber * 92 = god does not exist.
Checkmate. (See why using logic is important?)
