RE: Brahma and Abraham
September 15, 2020 at 8:46 am
(This post was last modified: September 15, 2020 at 8:59 am by The Grand Nudger.)
No, it's not. Gods become men and men become gods and gods become demons and imps and leprechauns in confluence of cultures. That's how we got jesus..and the devil. They're archetypes, not people, Grand. Geographic and ethnic purity of religious myths is the fucking stretch (the abrahamic stretch, no less). Abraham isn't a person, he's a pseudo-genealogical construct for a cultural tradition and nation.
Abrahamic religions reject this relationship dogmatically, as a matter of faith, but not fact. Meanwhile, since hindus don't need to deny any possible relationship between their ideology and the western ideologies they influenced, they're fine with noting those archetypal and narrative similarities.
I suspect that you're getting ahead of yourself, and looking to head off some poor argument (or argument you percieve to be poor). Do that when it happens. It's going to be tough. At this level, though, it borders on impossible. Cultures with a long history of contact, which other cultures believed were related, and which the culture in question believed was related enough to write it down in their own (granted, a-factual "history"), just somehow ended up with a whole gaggle of the same stories and characters..but it wasn't on account of syncretism.
Maybe an angel flew down and related the details to some illiterate in a cave.
Abrahamic religions reject this relationship dogmatically, as a matter of faith, but not fact. Meanwhile, since hindus don't need to deny any possible relationship between their ideology and the western ideologies they influenced, they're fine with noting those archetypal and narrative similarities.
I suspect that you're getting ahead of yourself, and looking to head off some poor argument (or argument you percieve to be poor). Do that when it happens. It's going to be tough. At this level, though, it borders on impossible. Cultures with a long history of contact, which other cultures believed were related, and which the culture in question believed was related enough to write it down in their own (granted, a-factual "history"), just somehow ended up with a whole gaggle of the same stories and characters..but it wasn't on account of syncretism.
Maybe an angel flew down and related the details to some illiterate in a cave.
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