HORUS VS. JESUS? Im confused!

[searching088]

I’m very confused, I am constantly searching for what/who god is. I am a very open minded person but i don’t believe anything without evidence because i think it is completely irrational to not have actual evidence to back up a belief. I started to come across the teachings of Christ and how genuine they were and it really made me interested in it. I recently saw the the film “Religulous” and this film really opened my mind to the how man-made religion is. In the film they showed that the life of the Egyptian god Horus, is exactly the same as the life of Christ described in scripture and the Horus story was written way before the story of Christ. This really confused me and i was wondering what people think about this from a catholic perspective.

here is a link to the comparisons of their lives:

religioustolerance.org/chr_jcpa5.htm

 

[Rolltide]

Here’s a link that I just found offhand that refutes a lot of that. There’s a lot of made-up information on the site you linked.

I think that this link is just a general Christian website, not Catholic, but the rebuttals are sound, nonetheless:
kingdavid8.com/Copycat/JesusHorus.html

 

[searching088]

thanks! it’s hard to know what to believe these days hah

 

[Grateful4mercy]

Hi searching,

I’m glad to see you found our little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll find that there is much more here to discover. I’m afraid, though, that there is very little evidential proof for God. That is why it is called ‘faith’ and not ‘knowing’. We don’t have to ‘believe’ in things we know by evidence.

I began my journey to God with the big questions, maybe they will sound familiar to you.

If there is no God, then there is no purpose to the universe. The universe seems ordered and purposeful. What is behind the order?

Why is it advantageous for oxygen to bond with hydrogen to form water? What does the atom get out of it?

Why should some plants be eatable? Doesn’t that seem counter to their survival?

I’m not a strict creationist, it’s not Catholic doctrine, but I wonder how the exact same environmental conditions can cause so much variety.

Why would it be necessary for evolution to fill environmental needs?

Start looking for the “why” and maybe the “who” will find YOU.

Good luck. And there are zealots on both sides, Maher is just as intolerant as the people he likes to criticize. By their fruits will you know them.

 

[cranster]

Phil Vaz has a really good one about horus.
There’s alot of deception being thrown around in them thar comparisons between horus and Jesus.

Another thing to think about using simple logic. If horus was “all that” then why aren’t there horus churches all around the world? Why isn’t the worlds largest religion called horusianity? He’s older after all. That’s cause the only place horus exists are in text books and the arguments of the enemies of Christ whereas Jesus exists in peoples lives in a way that brings peace, hope, joy, fulfillment, and salvation. That is why His church is the largest and alive and there is no horus church.

 

[Usagi]

Why is it advantageous for oxygen to bond with hydrogen to form water? What does the atom get out of it?

The atoms aren’t getting anything out of the reaction for themselves as individuals. They aren’t alive and don’t have goals.

The reaction that converts H2 and O2 to H2O requires less energy than the reverse reaction. Thus, over time, you’re going to have more cases of the water molecule forming than of it breaking apart. That’s all.

Why should some plants be eatable? Doesn’t that seem counter to their survival?

Some plants have evolved to use their edibility. Their seeds are spread through the droppings of the animals that eat them.

Evolution does not operate on an individual level. That some plants die is not necessarily going to spur further change as long as the species as a whole is still able to reproduce.

In the case of plant edibility, it is the animals that have evolved to gain energy from eating plants rather than directly from the sun. All living things need energy to continue living, and except for weird cases near ocean-floor vents, all the ones on earth ultimately get that energy from the sun. Some get it directly (plants); others by eating the plants; still others by eating the ones that have eaten the plants.

I’m not a strict creationist, it’s not Catholic doctrine, but I wonder how the exact same environmental conditions can cause so much variety.

The earth has a considerable range of environmental conditions, so I’m not sure what you mean by “the exact same.”

Why would it be necessary for evolution to fill environmental needs?

Again, I’m not sure I get what you are saying.

Evolution does not have a purpose or a goal. It’s just something that, as far as we can tell, happens when certain conditions are true:

1. Living things pass on their traits to their offspring.
2. However, traits are passed on in such a way (usually via sexual reproduction) that no offspring is identical to its parents or siblings.

1. Those differences in traits make a difference as to which offspring survive to have their own offspring (and pass on their traits).

Just because those conditions exist, without any outside intervention, traits that grant a survival advantage in the current environment will spread as generations pass.

A creature born with a trait that lets it practice an entirely new way of obtaining food and other resources has the advantage of a lack of competition, and so that new trait is likely to spread. In later generations, even more useful refinements of the new trait might appear and spread in turn, eventually causing the altered population to diverge completely from the original one.

Usagi

Usagi

 

[VociMike]

searching,

As you are finding out, these “similarities” are not identical at all. People with an anti-Christian agenda have simply invented the claim that they are identical.

But my question for you is, do you believe that many of the earliest Christians were actually killed? If so, why would they allow themselves to be killed for a story they themselves made up?

 

[maize]

horus vs. jesus

i think marvel put that one out.

it was in one of those weird matchups they did back in the day, like spiderman vs. superman in a dc/marvel crossover.

 

[Grateful4mercy]

I like the direction of this conversation, but I don’t want to derail this thread. Maybe we should start another on the issue of causality and evolution as an artificial intelligence?

The atoms aren’t getting anything out of the reaction for themselves as individuals. They aren’t alive and don’t have goals.

The reaction that converts H2 and O2 to H2O requires less energy than the reverse reaction. Thus, over time, you’re going to have more cases of the water molecule forming than of it breaking apart. That’s all

Some plants have evolved to use their edibility. Their seeds are spread through the droppings of the animals that eat them.

Evolution does not operate on an individual level. That some plants die is not necessarily going to spur further change as long as the species as a whole is still able to reproduce.

In the case of plant edibility, it is the animals that have evolved to gain energy from eating plants rather than directly from the sun. All living things need energy to continue living, and except for weird cases near ocean-floor vents, all the ones on earth ultimately get that energy from the sun. Some get it directly (plants); others by eating the plants; still others by eating the ones that have eaten the plants.

The earth has a considerable range of environmental conditions, so I’m not sure what you mean by “the exact same.”

Again, I’m not sure I get what you are saying.

Evolution does not have a purpose or a goal. It’s just something that, as far as we can tell, happens when certain conditions are true:

1. Living things pass on their traits to their offspring.
2. However, traits are passed on in such a way (usually via sexual reproduction) that no offspring is identical to its parents or siblings.

1. Those differences in traits make a difference as to which offspring survive to have their own offspring (and pass on their traits).

Just because those conditions exist, without any outside intervention, traits that grant a survival advantage in the current environment will spread as generations pass.

A creature born with a trait that lets it practice an entirely new way of obtaining food and other resources has the advantage of a lack of competition, and so that new trait is likely to spread. In later generations, even more useful refinements of the new trait might appear and spread in turn, eventually causing the altered population to diverge completely from the original one.

Usagi

Usagi

 

[Usagi]

I like the direction of this conversation, but I don’t want to derail this thread. Maybe we should start another on the issue of causality and evolution as an artificial intelligence?

Sure, go for it

I’ll be happy to participate.

Usagi

 

[PhilVaz]

searching << In the film they showed that the life of the Egyptian god Horus, is exactly the same as the life of Christ described in scripture and the Horus story was written way before the story of Christ. This really confused me and i was wondering what people think about this from a catholic perspective. >>

The Religulous “mockumentary” of religion will be completely utterly obliterated by me. I took an audio recorder into the theatre, and I’ve seen it a couple of times as well. I don’t know when I will finish, but I do want to make sure I take the absolutely best “clips” from the film, and respond to those. There isn’t much there in fact, just a bunch of sound bites but I’m sure evangelical scientists such as Francis Collins or Fr. George Coyne of the Vatican Observatory answered a lot of Bill Maher’s questions. Although I did find the movie “funny” at points, the argumentation and questions of Bill Maher are bogus since they are not the questions of a serious “seeker.” I doubt he spent more than a couple minutes on the Internet. Granted it takes a lot of effort to make a movie, but Maher’s (and the producers) research and questions into Christianity (and furthermore into Judaism, Islam, or Mormonism, and the rest) appeared very shallow.

Too bad Maher did not interview folks like Peter Kreeft of Boston College, William Lane Craig of BIOLA, or any number of competent evangelical or Catholic scholars. Anyone at Catholic Answers would have been fine as well. Of course that would have made a terrible “mockumentary” since all of Bill Maher’s questions and objections would have been addressed and answered in detail. And it wouldn’t have been very funny.

As for Jesus is Horus, Bill Maher does not know what he is talking about. He picked this up from bogus “parallel pagan” or “copycat” sites on the Internet. Go to a library Bill Maher, DO NOT rely on the Internet. That goes for anyone.

You will find the best sources for the Egyptian god Horus as The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt edited by Redford (Oxford Univ, 2001) or The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian gods and goddesses by George Hart (Routledge, 2005). None of the “parallels” to Horus are confirmed but directly refuted in professional Egyptology books (or simply not mentioned because they are indeed made up). Maher refers to the “Egyptian Book of the Dead” in a subtitle text. Sorry, that Egyptian source does not refer to Horus at all, or at least is not a major primary source for our knowledge of Horus. The major primary sources are spelled out in detail in my “All About Horus” article.

The producers of “Religulous” spent a couple minutes on the Internet. Sorry, that won’t do. See my Parallel Pagan “Saviors” Examined for a complete comparison.

On the reliability of the Gospels, for starters see a Critique of "The God Who Wasn’t There" by Mike Licona and Defending the Gospels, two articles on my site.

For more in depth material and arguments, see the books listed in any of these articles.

Phil P

 

[strngrnrth]

You have only begun your discovery of the history of religion, and like many of us before you, you embarked on your journey through the path of copycatism – a desperate last-ditch effort by the antireligious fringe to shoot holes in the truth. Their shells merely ricochet and hit their own positions instead.
No, Horus was not like Jesus – nor was Mithra (Mithras, as the later Roman soldiers pronounced it), Dionysius, Prometheus, or Osiris – nor were these figures much like one another. The similarities are about as deep and about as common as the similarities between any two randomly chosen real or fictitious personages from literature and history. In fact there is a game in which players choose two people randomly and “prove” they are the same person, the later one only a retelling of the earlier. It’s so easy it could be a drinking game. Everyone is a little like everyone, and beyond the usual number of superficial coincidences, Jesus is nothing like Horus or the rest of the copycat candidates.
Down the road you will meet many more formidable foes. Do not fear them. They also are laden with absurdity and will slip on their own overflowing falsehoods, self-contradictions and semantic sophistries, and you will step over them by the hundreds to glimpse the facts.
IOW, stick around.

 

[Zlatan]

I read that Mithras, horus, Dionysus and Krishna all lead lives like jesus and all were crucified but i can find no record of them all being crucified

 

[Zlatan]

i also read that mithras, horus, Osirus etc all had their birthdays on december the 25th in different articles but they all cant havehad the same birthday lol. I thin k these guys invent a lot of stuff because no nuetral sources confirm their claims. I know Sol Ivictus had his birthday on december the 25th and christmas comes from this pagan festival which was later invented to replace the lost pagan celebrations when christianity was legitimised but nowhere in the bible does it say that jesus was born on the 25th of december or that we should celibrate christmas as the celibration is just a later pagan invention, it doesnt mean jesus is also a pagan invention

 

[Phantom1539]

i don’t know if anyone will actually read this as this is an old thread, but I have been struggling with this as well.

We can bicker over minor points like whether or not these Gods were born on December 25, but we can’t deny that the basic parellels are there. Dionysus DID turn water into wine. He WAS crucified. Many of these gods claimed to be the light of the world, the king of kings, that Bread was their body and wine their blood. NINETY PERCENT of whats in the gospels has already been seen thousands of years before Christ…

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer and apologist, cites this as one of the reasons why started out as an atheist, then agnostic, then came to believe in God and finally Jesus… He said that these previous “gods” PREFIGURE Christ; like a prophecy, predicting Christ’s coming.

Yet, this seems like a copout… If anybody replies, I will expound.

 

[Zlatan]

I suggest you go and read some solid scholarship on the issue because the Allegations of Zietgiest, the god who wasn’t there and other such programs are pure misinformation. Dionysus was never crucified , neither was Krishna or Buddha as such programs have alleged. Jesus was never born on the 25th as there is no mention of it in the Bible When Christianity became the official religion, the traditional pagan ceremonies were replaced with the Christian festival, Christmas.

bringyou.to/apologetics/JesusEvidenceCrucifiedSaviors.htmZietgiest

 

[lemonbeam]

Look at these following websites:

thedevineevidence.com/index_articles.html

thedevineevidence.com/jesus_similarities.html

bringyou.to/apologetics/HORUS.htm

 

[lemonbeam]

Go to a university library, find the best scholarly up-to-date books on Egyptology, historical Jesus, ancient Israel/Judaism, astrology, etc look up and compare the “Zeitgeist” claims against the best souces you can find, etc.

–

excerpt from:
ZEITGEIST: REFUTING THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE [TRANSCRIPT]

In Part 1 of the film Zeitgeist, nearly 200 sources are cited in the transcript. Yet, many of these sources are used more than once. In fact, when the transcript for this film is examined in further detail, we see that less than 25% of these sources are original.
The idea that Jesus is a copycat Solar Deity has been propagated by the self-taught Egyptologist and practicing druid Gerald Massey (wikipedia); homosexual activist and philosopher Edward Carpenter (wikipedia); atheist professor John Allegro; and authors Peter Gandy & Timothy Freke and Acharya S.

Another source cited in the film was occultist and mystic H.P. Blavatsky and her book The Secret Doctrine. Blavatsky was the founder of the Theosophical Society, one of the most powerful occult organization in the world that has perhaps had more influence on the United Nations than any other religious society. The Nazi movement was founded on Theosophy and her writing. Blavatskys book The Secret Doctrine, which was cited in the film Zeitgeist, was known to be an inspiration to Adolf Hitler, specifically towards his ideas about superior and inferior races. (Spielvogel; wikipedia). In The Secret Doctrine she wrote, ‘‘In antiquity and reality, Lucifer or Luciferus, is the name of the angelic Entity presiding over the light of truth as over the light of the day. Lucifer is divine and terrestrial light, the Holy Ghost and Satan at one and the same time.’’(512, 513)

She also wrote, ‘‘And now it stands proven that Satan, or the Red Fiery Dragon, the Lord of Phosphorus . . . . and Lucifer or Light Bearer, is in us . . . . it is our mind . . . . [our] Redeemer, our intelligent liberator and Saviour from pure animalism.’’ (513)
Gerald Massey, cited 30 times, wrote for the Theosophical magazine entitled Lucifer published by H.P. Blavatsky.

Also cited: Godfrey Higgins, Albert Churchwood, and Manly P. Hall were all members of the Freemasons secret society. Manly P. Hall, a 33rd degree Mason, wrote on page 48 of his book Lost Keys of Freemasonry: When a Mason learns that the key is the proper application of the dynamo of living power, the seething energies of Lucifer are in his hands. (Hall, 48).

First of all, there are no original citations from Egyptian records pre-dating the New Testament to support these ideas listed in books by authors including Albert Churchwood, Acharya S, Gerald Massey, and Thomas Doane. Secondly, this is a far too simplistic representation of the myths surrounding Horus. In reality, there are many versions. There were originally several different gods known by the name Horus (Miller).
As for resurrections, academic scholars of religion acknowledge that there is no evidence for the belief that any of these mythical deities were believed to have risen from the dead prior to the time of New Testament and Jesus.

Dr. Walter Burkert, a Greek religion scholar and author stated, There is no evidence for a resurrected Attis, even Osiris remains with the dead (Burkert). Dr. Norman Geisler wrote, The only known account of a god surviving death that predates Christianity is the Egyptian cult god Osiris. In this myth, Osiris is cut into fourteen pieces, scattered around Egypt, then reassembled and brought back to life by the goddess Isis. However, Osiris does not actually come back to physical life but becomes a member of a shadowy underworld. . . This is far different than Jesus resurrection account where he was the gloriously risen Prince of life who was seen by others on earth before his ascension into heaven. . . even if there are myths about dying and rising gods prior to Christianity, that doesnt mean the New Testament writers copied from them. (Geisler).

Even atheists and non-Christian scholars have rejected this idea that Christianity has been borrowed from ancient myths. The well respected Sir Edward Evans Pritchard wrote, The evidence for this theory. . . is negligible. (Ankerberg, Weldon). In sum, skeptic claims of Christianity being borrowed from ancient Egypt, India, Greece, and Persia can be disregarded as false because there are no primary sources for these parallels pre-dating A.D. 150. This is more than 100 years after the origin of Christianity!

Full transcript available.

 

[lemonbeam]

Father Barron on Zeitgeist - youtube.com/watch?v=wZk9Lb22Kr

Refuting Zeitgeist - youtube.com/watch?v=5EAjsKXELrM

 

[codebilly]

i don’t know if anyone will actually read this as this is an old thread, but I have been struggling with this as well.

We can bicker over minor points like whether or not these Gods were born on December 25, but we can’t deny that the basic parellels are there. Dionysus DID turn water into wine. He WAS crucified. Many of these gods claimed to be the light of the world, the king of kings, that Bread was their body and wine their blood. NINETY PERCENT of whats in the gospels has already been seen thousands of years before Christ…

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer and apologist, cites this as one of the reasons why started out as an atheist, then agnostic, then came to believe in God and finally Jesus… He said that these previous “gods” PREFIGURE Christ; like a prophecy, predicting Christ’s coming.

Yet, this seems like a copout… If anybody replies, I will expound.

It’s not a copout. It is a fact. Jewish worship of Helios as Supreme Deity was in practice before the advent of Jesus Christ.

http://members.bib-arch.org/bswb_graphics/BSBA/27/02/BSBA270205200.jpg
members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=27&Issue=2&ArticleID=7

Mosaic of the Vatican grottoes under St. Peter’s Basilica, on the ceiling of the tomb of the Julii (Pope Julius I). Representation of Christ as the sun-god Helios or Sol Invictus riding in his chariot. Dated to the 3rd century AD.



Study of Greek, Egyptian, near east and even far eastern worship clearly shows a monotheistic worship with Horous/Helios at the center of worship.

One must also understand that there are always two schools of thought pervading history, … the theistic and the impersonal atheistic. For example, Homer’s depictions of the gods are non devotional. Whereas, other Greek authors (e.g. Socrates …) indicate that he was a fervent in his love for God.

Further the Krisna (India) Kouros (Greece ) Ra (Egypt) and Uri ( Israel) are all cognate words.

Also cognate are:
Hari Heli-os Hiero Helios Heri Eli/Ari Jeru Heli Hrih
India Greece Egypt Israel Christianity ( Asia)

The systems of worship in the cities of root word Ur, Pur, Puri, Pol, Polis, also show evidence of mono theist (actually as "divine couple (e.g. Rodha Kouros )) worship throughout the entire world.

And finally, lets not forget that the Jesus said the Roman soldier’s faith was great!

One God was worshipped everywhere throughout the world.