So you’re both generally right, but it can be easy to forget how universalist rank-and-file Christians can be (not that Jeong necessarily matches that description – I agree that he just seems honest, but I also suspect he is doing some of the gymnastics I alluded to).

I went to a funeral of a friend who had become a messianic Christian (though a deeply liberal one) and his father had talked about how they had bonded over faith, and his father indicated that he actually didn’t know for sure that he’d seen his son again in Heaven. When you get away from fundies and apologists, people are a lot more uncertain and a lot more syncretic.

I agree that Buddhism is obviously particularly open to taking in outside insights, because the goal is salvation from suffering and so we’re very happy to borrow from anyone’s toolbox to learn, but lots of spiritual thinkers are seekers in the same vein who really want to get at God and truth and enlightenment and thus will be more open to syncretism.

Yes, at that point one is abandoning a more literal prophetic tradition, but in practice people do that all the time.

However, the most organized, ideologically devoted, loud people are the ones who are bucking against modernity and increasingly becoming a fascist death cult. The same applies to fundamentalist Islam: It’s a reaction to modernity and the fear of secularism.

I’ve just found that guys like Jeong not only prioritize truth and honesty in their academics but also tend to be willing to fudge even more on certain dogmas than the average fundie.

That totally makes sense to me. I myself, oscillated between 1 and 3 for 11 years or so until I finally embraced 2. Indoctrination is a hell of a trap.

I totally agree with Dr. Carrier here and was actually trying to say something similar in my previous reply albeit in a less knowledgeable and eloquent manner.

Is 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22 not popular in English? (Fully, purposefully, and rightfully ignoring the fact that it’s talking about prophecies in 5:20.) Because that’s the way Dutch Christians and non-Christians alike express that very thought.

It should be noted that in one important detail this analogy is inapt:

Buddhism is a kind of nature cult, in the way Taoism and Wicca and even Confucianism is (the latter focuses more on the “nature” of human society; Buddhism, on the “nature” of human conscious existence). It is therefore pre-built to accept and employ pre-cult and extra-cult discoveries, i.e. finding truths outside the religion is not a threat, since the religion is more like a science in that its goal is to find truths that already exist out there (threats can only come when external truths conflict with essential internal beliefs, which then depends on which sect of Buddhism we are talking about).

However, Judeo-Christian-Islam-Mormonism (which is really just a bunch of sects of Judaism) is not a nature cult but a prophetic cult: it believes that a single royal deity has proclaimed all truths through inspired and thus authorized scriptures, and perhaps even (depending on sect) yet-continuing prophecy (e.g. Mormon Prophets are still a thing) or equivalent (e.g. the Pope is imagined to have a special line to God; and something akin is attributed to Protestant preachers “in the Holy Spirit”).

That means any fact conflicting with prophecy/inspired authority is a problem. So, unlike Buddhism, which can claim a lost fact has always been a fact of nature waiting to be discovered, JCIM can’t say that, because God is supposed to have told them everything important, and he can’t have been wrong. He certainly can’t be a plagiarist. So, if the parable of Lazarus sounds suspiciously like a pagan Egyptian parable, that becomes a problem, because now Jesus is just creatively rewriting a merely human (and worse, demonic) story and passing it off as wisdom, which is hard to reconcile with a belief that he was The One and Only God whose wisdom is singular and unique and can’t have been invented by mere mortals, least of all demon-worshiping mortals.

JCIM is thus far more susceptible to cognitive dissonance, and indeed becomes more and more so as the human knowledge-base increases—which is why science has posed such an obvious and corrosive effect on it, and thus why JCIM has had to divert so many resources to combatting or suppressing scientific knowledge or access to it.

I also think this is why we are in an Age of Transition now from traditional religion (based on supernatural superstitions, e.g. a literal belief in demons) to political religion (a la Jordan Peterson). As I wrote before:

I can’t prove it. But I do suspect—metaphorically speaking—that these guys are the id of an overly-ignorant public too overconfident even to see their own ignorance, much less recognize it as a problem they need to solve. These guys’ fans and worshipers are essentially the secular replacement for their predecessors, the Creationists and Fundamentalists. The mindset, the epistemology, the moral and existential panic, the rationalizing, the persecution complex, the outrage at being questioned or criticized, is all exactly the same. These are literally the same people…or would have been. Lately, ancient superstitions about devils and blood magic and angelic armies raining down from the sky have become an increasingly harder sell, so Creationism and Fundamentalism are declining. Those who would have been seduced by their cool-aide twenty years ago, are instead seduced by this new, more modern brew. This is where they went. And because it’s “secular,” atheists are being roped in by it, every bit as much as disaffected Christians are.

Thank you, Shane. That’s a valuable contribution here.

And it reminds me to reiterate (what you also discovered): that Jeong wrote several hundred pages establishing Yarbro Collins’ point in detail. Which was the final straw motivating my own article here.

There is cognitive dissonance when an irrational belief conflicts with strongly attested factual reality. One can escape cognitive dissonance in three ways: flee (just don’t study it and avoid conversations about it; or denigrate and attempt to eliminate the fact that threatens), accept (and thus abandon the irrational belief, escaping the religion), or merge (find some way to make the belief and the fact compatible, usually via something that is convoluted enough that to show it is illogical or bonkers requires more than one or two steps of reasoning, so it is easy to hide from these consequences with more convoluted reasoning, a.k.a. apologetics).

Many religious traditions today come with a strong value-support for reason and truth (particularly certain older Protestant sects), as opposed to fundamentalists, for example, who denigrate reason, education, science, and intellectualism and are more comfortable with suppressing facts and lying for Jesus. Those stuck in highly “truth respecting” sects tend to choose option 3 when facing cognitive dissonance, or some combination of 1 and 3. Jeong could have chosen 2, in which case he’d no longer be a believer when he published (though keep your eye on him: see where he is in ten years).

For example, many even in Jeong’s sect fled this fact (hence why only now is he, alone, publishing a syncretic work on it; his intro sections even discuss this tendency prior to him, though he cites others preceding him who have led the way, so he can rest assured he is not entirely alone and thus “safe” to “go there”), and he then activates both solution 1 and 3:

(1) Jeong “dismisses” the dying-rising god-sharing theme not by lying or denying it outright, but with convoluted apologetics about it not being exactly identical and “thus” irrelevant, and not dwelling on it (it gets a few dismissive sentences; he otherwise flees from it, after “eliminating” it with an “irrelevancy” apologetic).

(2) But Jeong cannot do this with the rest; the evidence is too strong and extensive, and I am sure it started to feel slimy and dishonest to try and apologetically get rid of it. Guilt and shame likely drove him not to do that, leaving only options 2 and 3. To preserve his strong faith, therefore, it had to be 3. So what he does is try to develop an apologetic whereby the fact still gets to be true and Christianity remains true.

Jeong activates that solution with claims about how Christianity still has to instantiate according to existing cultural norms and models (per his citation of cultural anthropology as his guiding system of interpretation), and so it “makes sense” for God to have his first followers “borrow” and adapt familiar mechanisms to spread his One True Faith (Jeong remains more scientific in approach, as is befitting this respect-for-the-truth style, and thus does not dwell much into his conflict of interest, i.e. practical theology, but you can infer it by reading between the lines of the apologetic constructs he does deploy).

No, I actually read the article, and, I actually “got the point”: “Baptism was thus no more unique to Christianity than a resurrected or virgin born savior”, and . “Initiation into the various mysteries, usually facilitated by some form of baptism, was understood as a merging with their savior god (typically a demigod), and thus a sharing in both their suffering and their triumph”. (Which is a great parallel to Christian baptism).

Cherry picking is not reading. If you had read, you’d have noticed the entire argument of the article is that the telltale pagan element is not atonement ritual (because that was already Jewish), but sharing in the demigod’s suffering and victory over death. There are lots of sentences (more than two!) you could have quoted to show that. But you didn’t. Instead, you persisted in ignoring this, the entire argument of the article, to claim the article is about something else, which it explicitly says it isn’t about (sin-cleansing rituals). You only changed tune after I caught you in this mistake.

In Sikhism’s Amrit Sanskar or Zoroastrianism’s Navjote, the bond created through these rituals is comparable to Christian baptism in terms of establishing a commitment to a god or religious community.

That’s still not the same thing. And wouldn’t be trivial if it were.

Sanskar is 1500 years later and thus could simply be borrowing back from Christianity, so that won’t work for your thesis or mine. But let’s take Navjote:

Suppose you could present me a passage from an ancient text that shows a water ritual that procures a blessed eternal life for the recipient through sharing in a cosmic suffering and victory over death of the savior god “Navjote.” That would be great! It would then support my article’s point: Christianity borrowed this from surrounding pagan culture, just as (and I even said this) Judaism already borrowed resurrection (and messianism and apocalypticism) from Zoroastrianism.

Because Zoroastrianism was all over the Roman Empire by then (especially the Middle East; it was formalized into a Greco-Roman mystery cult in the form of Mithraism around the same time as Christianity, but had been around there before that for centuries). You would simply be reinforcing my article’s thesis: Christian baptism wasn’t an original construct of Jesus or the Apostles, and very much borrowed from and emulated existing salvior cults and their shared ideology and symbology.

Does that somehow “negate” the Christian’s perceived value and reason they undergo baptism? Hardly.

My article says nothing about that. Again, you are completely missing the thesis of the article.

That would be like saying “Mithraists borrowed their baptism from Dionysian cult, therefore Mithraists had no perceived value or reason to undergo their baptism.” Obviously that’s not true. It’s the other way around. Mithraists perceived the value and reason to undergo their baptism precisely because they understood its cultural origins and context and thus what it represented for them.

This is why (as I quote them saying) Christians tried crediting prior pagan salvific and purifying baptisms as tricks of the devil anticipating theirs: they realized it was just the latest iteration among many, yet needed theirs to be the “real” one. So they had to denigrate the others as “demonic fakes.” This is because Christians, unlike other savior cults, were exclusivist, and so needed to destroy competing baptisms, rather than simply accept them as equivalent to theirs.

Some early Christian might have learned the whole Greek concept of “unifying with a god, sharing in both their suffering and triumph” and said “wow, I like that idea, and we should do that as well – but – for the sake of unity with Christ”, and even then, with that very-real consciousness of where the idea came from, the value of it, and the reason they (Christians) would do it is in the “belief” that there is some kind of “unifying factor”, as long as it’s done “in the name of Christ”.

Paul explicitly says this is what baptism was: unifying with Jesus to share the suffering (death) and triumph over death (resurrection) of Jesus and thus secure a blessed eternal life. That’s the point of my article: when Christians invented baptism, it was essentially identical to pagan savior cult baptism (I track the differences to the other half of the hybridization: Judaism).

Maybe you didn’t know this? Maybe you think modern concepts of baptism are the same as the first generation of Christian baptism? If so, follow the Bible verses cited here (in the graphic and the text), and you’ll find many more in the referenced article where this side of the story is covered in more detail: No, the Original Christians Did Not Loot Egypt. These verses show how close Christian baptism was in the beginning to pagan savior cult baptism all around them—indeed, one of the most telltale indicators is the casual acceptance of baptism for the dead.

While I totally get your point, I think applying that to finding these adaptations in Abrahamic religions with their “exclusive ultimate truth revealed directly by the perfect being and creator” model is extremely hard.
Take the baptism case for example, this literally means that the core initiation into the Christian faith is a “pagan/heathen” invention. Or the Quranic story I was talking about which is represented as literal history and its outcome literally connected to one of the major signs of the apocalypse/end times in Islam and then you find that it’s a copied legend.
I find it extremely hard to reconcile faith with these tbh.