(September 15, 2020 at 8:46 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: 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.
Syncretism can be true, Abraham can be an archetype, the character Abraham may not have been created ex nihilo, but it still wouldn't get you to "the character Abraham is based on the character Brahma". I'm not getting ahead of myself here, you're the one twisting the message behind the OP so you can become right.
