Why Middle East?

[dtango]

1. All three? There are no other main religions? As a matter of fact there are, and all but those few you mentioned did not originate in the middleeast.

Modern humans themselves (excepting Sub-Saharan Africans) originated in the Middle East.
The gods were born in the Middle East.
Theology was born into the Egyptian temples.
How could god featuring religions have originated elsewhere?

[Anomalocaris]

1. All three? There are no other main religions? As a matter of fact there are, and all but those few you mentioned did not originate in the middleeast.

Modern humans themselves (excepting Sub-Saharan Africans) originated in the Middle East.
The gods were born in the Middle East.
Theology was born into the Egyptian temples.
How could god featuring religions have originated elsewhere?

No, No, No, and easily.

[kılıç_mehmet]

Why did all the three main religions (that is Christianity, Judaism and Islam) have thier origins in the middle east? I am curious. I asked this to my fellow Christian brothers and none could answer it. Probably someone here can.

I have actually heeded advise from some members here and now doing my own research.

Well, if I'd ask my fellow, devout nationalists here, they would certainly answer, "The people of the middle east(semites) were exceedingly wicked people, for that purpose, God had send his prophets to them".
Other than that, the real question should be "How did these religions became "three main" world religions?".

[Minimalist]

The gods were born in the Middle East.

The earliest evidence of ritual to date was found in Botswana a few years ago, going back to roughly 70,000 BC.

[mediamogul]

The gods were born in the Middle East.

The earliest evidence of ritual to date was found in Botswana a few years ago, going back to roughly 70,000 BC.

Christianity especially is steeped in the philosophical thinking associated with the Greeks. I think you are right in terms of Zoroastrianism being the first monotheistic religion in the narrow sense (the common ancestor) but the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity and Islam are firmly Greek. Catholicism essentially hijacked Aristotelian ethics, Platonic metaphysics in the sense of a more perfect world beyond this one, and a thoroughly Greek dualism in terms of the separation between body and "soul". Many civilizations had animistic beliefs and superstitions regarding the natural world and their "gods" but I want to say that religion in the sense that we understand it was institutionalized in monotheism in the Middle East. Dawkins described Islam and Christianity as "carnivore" and Buddhism as "herbivore". Middle Eastern monotheism had a seriously aggressive bent to it which can account for it's spread within the "memeplex" of competing religious ideas. This could also account for it's "catchiness".

[The Grand Nudger]

Why did all the three main religions (that is Christianity, Judaism and Islam) have thier origins in the middle east? I am curious. I asked this to my fellow Christian brothers and none could answer it. Probably someone here can.

I have actually heeded advise from some members here and now doing my own research.

"Main" to whom, and are we judging this only by reference to the present? That would be problem one and two with the question, before we even get into answering the question. You're speaking about three variations on the same fable, is it any wonder that they come from the same (extremely large) place? To be fair, all three seem to have some hitchhikers, not all of them from the middle east.

[Minimalist]

Christianity especially is steeped in the philosophical thinking associated with the Greeks. I think you are right in terms of Zoroastrianism being the first monotheistic religion in the narrow sense (the common ancestor) but the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity and Islam are firmly Greek.

I don't think it is quite that cut and dried, M/M. Alexander the Great overran the Persian ( Zoroastrian) Empire by 331 but prior to that the Persians had controlled an empire which incorporated many Greek city states in what is now Turkey as well as various Aegean islands. Ideas flowed along the trade routes, too.

The Greeks defeated the Persians in 479 BC at Plataea ending the invasion and warfare continued for another 30 years between Athens' Delian League and Persia. But other Greek states were not involved and contacts with Persia and the Greek states in the Persian sphere revived. It was another hundred years before Alexander began his attack. People can learn a lot in 100 years.


P.S. Xtians hate it when you suggest that their godboy was not an original thinker.

But, you're right.


Fuck them.

[mediamogul]

Christianity especially is steeped in the philosophical thinking associated with the Greeks. I think you are right in terms of Zoroastrianism being the first monotheistic religion in the narrow sense (the common ancestor) but the philosophical underpinnings of Christianity and Islam are firmly Greek.

I don't think it is quite that cut and dried, M/M. Alexander the Great overran the Persian ( Zoroastrian) Empire by 331 but prior to that the Persians had controlled an empire which incorporated many Greek city states in what is now Turkey as well as various Aegean islands. Ideas flowed along the trade routes, too.

The Greeks defeated the Persians in 479 BC at Plataea ending the invasion and warfare continued for another 30 years between Athens' Delian League and Persia. But other Greek states were not involved and contacts with Persia and the Greek states in the Persian sphere revived. It was another hundred years before Alexander began his attack. People can learn a lot in 100 years.


P.S. Xtians hate it when you suggest that their godboy was not an original thinker.

But, you're right.


Fuck them.

I think that the fundamental link to modern christian theology from Greece is through Plotinus and Neoplatonism. Plotinus lived around 204-270CE and traveled the Middle East.

From Wiki:

"After spending the next eleven years in Alexandria, he then decided to investigate the philosophical teachings of the Persian philosophers and the Indian philosophers around the age of 38.[6] In the pursuit of this endeavor he left Alexandria and joined the army of Gordian III as it marched on Persia. However, the campaign was a failure, and on Gordian's eventual death Plotinus found himself abandoned in a hostile land, and only with difficulty found his way back to safety in Antioch. At the age of forty, during the reign of Philip the Arab, he came to Rome, where he stayed for most of the remainder of his life. There he attracted a number of students."

Plotinus though not directly involved in the mythology and folklore aspect, had a direct and overwhelming effect on the development of particularly the Catholic cosmology, metaphysics, and epistemology. Though I worry that these terms are a bit generous for what actually happened to Plotinus' philosophy after the Catholics got ahold of him. Sounds as though he influenced and was perhaps influenced by Zoroastrian and Persian ideas himself but the Catholic worldview has always struck me as fundamentally Platonic in nature.

[Minimalist]

Plotinus lived around 204-270CE and traveled the Middle East.

Doesn't that merely make him the beneficiary of 6-7 centuries of earlier Greek thought? Pythagoras goes back to the 6th century BC.

[mediamogul]

Plotinus lived around 204-270CE and traveled the Middle East.

Doesn't that merely make him the beneficiary of 6-7 centuries of earlier Greek thought? Pythagoras goes back to the 6th century BC.

Absolutely. He is, without a doubt, standing on the shoulders of many great thinkers but I think that he is the essential link between Platonism and christianity. Many of those concepts that worked their way philosophically into christian theology but don't have a basis in the bible can be traced here. He may not have been original but he certainly was influential. This was also the same period where the modern bible as we know it was being solidified and all the crazy gnosticism was weeded out.