Raven wrote on Mar 13^th, 2017 at 8:07pm:

That is not exactly what I said is it....
there is no Christian state trying to convert the world to Christianity.  We have freedom of religion these days, we have secular democracies.  Unlike Islamic states.
I said the Secular West is not the same as those nations of the past where they sought to convert all nations to Christianity, much in the same way Fundamental Islam wishes to today.  Catholicism and the Papacy does not hold sway as it did in times LONG past.

There is no single Christian state that has that goal in mind.  There are no Christian nation states as there are Islamic states.  The US or Italy might be the closest on certain levels, but you cannot compare them to the past or current Islamic states.  Fundamental Islam lives in the past they claim the Crusades are still happening.

bwian thinks Mormons and Jehovahs witnesses are trying to convert the world to Christianity...  they might like it if we all were, but there is no compulsion as there is with Fundamental Islam.

issuevoter wrote on Mar 12^th, 2017 at 10:58pm:


Do you think that "do unto others" and "turn the other cheek" might have had an influence? The enlightenment was not exactly a bloodless movement.

Grendel wrote on Mar 13^th, 2017 at 8:47pm:


Backpeddle, Geoff.  Backpeddle.  It isn't what you said and now you're changing your statement because you realise you've been caught out.   How are we to know what you mean?  We can't read your mind.  Goose is a good nickname for you.   

Brian Ross wrote on Mar 13^th, 2017 at 11:15pm:

Liar liar bwian...  no back peddling involved just trying to clarify for raven, in a way it can understand what I said.

I don't bother with you...  you are a lost cause.
You just posted pedantic stupidity as you do...
Do stop wasting my time with your lies and obfuscation though eh...

moses wrote on Mar 14^th, 2017 at 1:45pm:


The same can be made for Judaism.

How about this? I'll agree that Allah is the Arabian Moon-God if you agree that Yahweh the Hebrew God is the Canaanite God of War? You can't pick and choose one: it's either both are neither these, or both are all of these. If you pick and choose one and not the other, then you're being biased, in which case your argument is weak.

Deal?

Grendel wrote on Mar 14^th, 2017 at 2:27pm:


Precisely because I am an an atheist. If I were an anti theist then I would be biased.

Second, the other member in question is Jewish. Why aren't you asking him if he's biased? Perhaps because you agree with him?

Here is a the article from Wikipedia about 'Yahweh'. It says:

"The Israelites originated as Bronze Age Canaanites, but Yahweh was not initially a Canaanite god.[10][11][Notes 1] The head of the Canaanite pantheon was El, and one theory is that the name Yahweh is a shortened form of el dū yahwī ṣaba’ôt, "El who creates the hosts", meaning the heavenly army accompanying El as he marched beside the earthly armies of Israel.[12] But Yahweh's earliest possible occurrence is as a place-name, "land of Shasu of YHW", in an Egyptian inscription from the time of Amenhotep III (1402–1363 BCE),[13] the Shasu being nomads from Midian and Edom in northern Arabia.[14] In this case a plausible etymology for the name could be from the root HWY, which would yield the meaning "he blows", appropriate to a weather divinity.[15][16].

There is considerable but not universal support for the view that the Egyptian inscriptions refer to Yahweh.[17] The question that arises is how he made his way to the north.[18] A widely accepted hypothesis is that traders brought Yahweh to Israel along the caravan routes between Egypt and Canaan, the Kenite hypothesis, named after one of the groups involved.[19] The strength of the Kenite hypothesis is the way it ties together various points of data, such as the absence of Yahweh from Canaan, his links with Edom and Midian in the biblical stories, and the Kenite or Midianite ties of Moses. However, while it is highly plausible that the Kenites, Midianites and others may have introduced Israel to Yahweh, it is highly unlikely that they did so outside the borders of Israel or under the aegis of Moses, as the Exodus story has it.[20]."

It then goes on to say:

"Israel emerges into the historical record in the last decades of the 13th century BCE, at the very end of the Late Bronze Age, as the Canaanite city-state system was ending.[21] The milieu from which Israelite religion emerged was accordingly Canaanite.[22] El, "the kind, the compassionate," "the creator of creatures," was the chief of the Canaanite gods,[23] and he, not Yahweh, was the original "God of Israel"—the word "Israel" is based on the name El rather than Yahweh.[24] He lived in a tent on a mountain from whose base originated all the fresh waters of the world, with the goddess Asherah as his consort.[23][25] This pair made up the top tier of the Canaanite pantheon;[23] the second tier was made up of their children, the "seventy sons of Athirat" (a variant of the name Asherah).[26] Prominent in this group was Baal, who had his home on Mount Zaphon; over time Baal became the dominant Canaanite deity, so that El became the executive power and Baal the military power in the cosmos.[27] Baal's sphere was the thunderstorm with its life-giving rains, so that he was also a fertility god, although not quite the fertility god.[28] Below the seventy second-tier gods was a third tier made up of comparatively minor craftsman and trader deities, with a fourth and final tier of divine messengers and the like.[26].

El and his sons made up the Assembly of the Gods, each member of which had a human nation under his care, and a textual variant of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 describes the sons of El, including Yahweh, each receiving his own people:[24]
When the Most High (Elyon, i.e., El) gave the nations their inheritance,
when he separated humanity,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of divine beings,
for Yahweh's portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.[Notes 2].

In the earliest literature such as the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1–18, celebrating Yahweh's victory over Egypt at the exodus), Yahweh is a warrior for his people, a storm-god typical of ancient Near Eastern myths, marching out from a region to the south or south-east of Israel with the heavenly host of stars and planets that make up his army.[29] Israel's battles are Yahweh's battles, Israel's victories are his victories, and while other peoples have other gods, Israel's god is Yahweh, who will procure a fertile resting-place for them:[30]
There is none like God, O Jeshurun (i.e., Israel).
--
In fact, it seems that the Hebrew God might have had origins in Pagan mythology, not just Canaanite.