Did Muhammad exist?

[The Grand Nudger]

You and I see eye to eye on finding comparative mythology interesting and worthwhile. I mean, if you go back far enough into Greece's history, you might find that there was some guy upon whom the god Zeus is based. From a comparative mythology standpoint this might interest us, but it would have no real bearing on how we interpret the stories. After all, at some point, the stories took on a life of their own, and "the real Zeus" is far less interesting than what poets from later generations had to say about him.

Euhemeris seemed to think so..but there's no explicit reason to make this assumption.  It may be the case..but, equally..sometime..a story is just a story.  There are certaily legendary and mythical characters whose character is too much of a contrivance of narrative requirements to be entertained as a real person.

Consider Icarus.  The question becomes, how many icari are there in the stories we tell.  

I'm going to make it a point to pick your brain about Christian history at some point, since you seem to know a thing or two about it. The stuff from early Roman Christianity up through Constantine interests me the most. Y'know, the interpretations of X, Y, and Z which was branded heresy in order to create "unity" among believers.

It's Mins brain you want to pick about that, not mine.  I only know these bits because of an interest in Julian, essentially, they're the prelude to the end of paganism..and it wasn't faith in the one true god or any of his prophets that conquered our preexisting beliefs, lol. Christianity bores me to tears. It's the dullest goddamned myth we ever devised. Made for and by bureaucrats. That much, at least, is amusing...that 30% of the worlds people, today, bow their heads to some shit that a bunch of mediterranean bean counters assembled by committee...because the emperor wanted a new pony.

[vulcanlogician]

It's Mins brain you want to pick about that, not mine.  I only know these bits because of an interest in Julian, essentially, they're the prelude to the end of paganism..and it wasn't faith in the one true god or any of his prophets that conquered our preexisting beliefs, lol.

Okay, aside from hearing the name before, I don't know much about Julian. I took a few minutes to breeze over his wiki article. I see why you find him interesting. His thinking that Christianity was the cause of the Roman decline reminds me of Nietzsche's thinking about the general decline (decadence) of societies. Whether speaking of the Greeks who embraced moral philosophy, the people of India who embraced Buddhism, or the latter day Romans who embraced eternal life through Christ, all of these systems seek to hold decadence at bay by demonizing the instincts (decadence was Nietzsche's word for "cultural decline").

But Nietzsche didn't think that Christianity was the cause of decadence but merely a symptom of it. What happens with all cultures, in Nietzsche's view, was that they rose to their zenith by embracing their instincts. But once they crossed that zenith, the slow and inevitable decline began. To Nietzsche, figures like Christ and Socrates would appear in cultures and try to resuscitate the dying vigor of a culture by naming its virtues, but alas, this was a fruitless exercise. Once your instincts begin to fail you, fighting your instincts only further zombifies the already dead cultural spirit which you are trying to revive.

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It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to believe that in waging war on decadence they are already emerging from it. It is beyond their power to emerge from it: whatever they choose as their means, their deliverance, is itself just another expression of decadence--they alter its expression, but they do not get rid of it. Socrates was a misunderstanding; the entire morality of improvement, Christianity's included, was a misunderstanding... The harshest daylight, rationality at all costs, life bright, cold, cautious, conscious, instinct-free, instinct-resistant: this itself was just an illness, a different illness--and definitely not a way back to "virtue," "health," happiness... To have to fight against one's own instincts--this is the formula for decadence: so long as life is ascendant, happiness equals instinct.
[Twilight of the Idols "The Problem of Socrates" #11]

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All this aside, do you think Julian was acting out of a sense of virtue? Or do you think he was motivated by power, ambition, etc?

[The Grand Nudger]

All this aside, do you think Julian was acting out of a sense of virtue? Or do you think he was motivated by power, ambition, etc?

Yes to all three.  I don't think, in Julians case, any of them can be separated from the other.  He certainly wouldn't have thought so. Christian hegemony was a competitor to his power (in all of the ways familiar to us today, right down to the cynical wisecracks). His ambition for rome could not accept such a division of authority, and he sought to use that authority to reestablish what he saw -as- the virtues of rome.

When I read Julian, I see a virtuous man trying to grapple with what had already become a belligerent religion at a wholly inopportune time...whereas when I read Constantine (for example)...I'm reading him for filth.

[Minimalist]

His thinking that Christianity was the cause of the Roman decline reminds me of Nietzsche's thinking about the general decline (decadence) of societies.

Yeah - I don't buy that.  Rome was in trouble in the mid 3d century, long before xtians attained any political power.  The biggest problem was the deterioration of the emperor into a "Man on Horseback" figure who was out leading the armies himself.  Continual political upheaval followed by the really dubious idea of dividing the empire into halves thereby virtually guaranteeing continual civil war.  The sad fact was that the Western Empire was too poor to support itself.  Thus I will give the xtians a pass on that one.  The Western Empire fell as a result of human error.  And one should remember that the Eastern empire lasted for a thousand years even with xtians fucking things up.

[The Grand Nudger]

Not just the deterioration of the idea of an emperors job..either, a deterioration in the quality of the people filling the boots, lol. Julian saw christianity as a parasite feeding on the corpse of rome. It was the degraded state of roman institutions that he saw as the culprit in it's demise. To that end, he booted christianity out of schools, took away their tax exemptions, and confiscated church lands...returning them to the public or to their original owners. While he was at it he booted do-nothing bishops in the bureaucracy.

[vulcanlogician]

Yeah, from what I read, I liked the fact he took Christianity out of education, but he was a bit of an oppressor by denying Christians education. I don't see how that helps anything.

[Minimalist]

They seem to get along fine without it now.

[The Grand Nudger]

Where on earth did you get the idea that he denied christians education?  He banned christians from using pagan classics as educators. Fitting, he seemed to think, in that they had demonized the culture and traditions from which those classics arose. He also knew that the classics provided a better education than the new testament, and correctly assumed that people who went to trash bible schools could not compete for status with their better educated peers. In effect, he was daring them to have the courage of their convictions. They did not. Simultaneously, christian society understood that if they were forced to send their children to pagan schools with pagan teachers..this presented an existential threat to the continued existence of their faith.

That, not producing an uneducated set of christians..was Julians aim. Laying aside the propagandizing lens of early catholic "history"..Julian was greatly in favor of public education (insomuch as it was understood then). He just didn't think christians could be trusted with the job, lol.

if they [Christians] want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark

[vulcanlogician]

Where on earth did you get the idea that he denied christians education?  He banned christians from using pagan classics as educators.  Fitting, in that they had demonized the culture and traditions from which those classics arose.  

if they [Christians] want to learn literature, they have Luke and Mark

Okay, I sense sarcasm, but I'm a little tired today and I can't be sure.

Julian also forbade the Christians from teaching classical texts and learning.

That's where I got the idea, and it seems you know what I'm talking about. All snarky quips and jabs aside, I see no utility in denying anyone a proper education. 

It is kind of funny though that anti-intellectualism is  something that certain Christians are happy to inflict on themselves nowadays. I'm sure some of them would even consider Greek philosophy "pagan devilry." It's like they are their own Emperor Julian's. Sad actually.

Edit: Okay, I see. But wiki said "forbade them from learning" so that's where I got the idea.

[The Grand Nudger]

He wasn't denying anyone an education (that wiki editor was lazy).  He left christians with the choice to deny their own children education on account of the teachers being pagans.  Subversion, not persecution.  He knew that persecution didn't work.  More broadly, he considered christian teachers who made their living off the classics to be shameless hypocrites. 

Here's more-notice the bold.

I hold that a proper education results, not in laboriously acquired symmetry of phrases and language, but in a healthy condition of mind, I mean a mind that has understanding and true opinions about things good and evil, honourable and base. Therefore, when a man thinks one thing and teaches his pupils another, in my opinion he fails to educate exactly in proportion as he fails to be an honest man. And if the divergence between a man’s convictions and his utterances is merely in trivial matters, that can be tolerated somehow, though it is wrong. But if in matters of the greatest importance a man has certain opinions and teaches the contrary, what is that but the conduct of hucksters, and not honest but thoroughly dissolute men in that they praise most highly the things that they believe to be most worthless, thus cheating and enticing by their praises those to whom they desire to transfer their worthless wares. Now all who profess to teach anything whatever ought to be men of upright character, and ought not to harbour in their souls opinions irreconcilable with what they publicly profess; and, above all, I believe it is necessary that those who associate with the young and teach them rhetoric should be of upright character; for they expound the writings of the ancients, whether they be rhetoricians or grammarians, and still more if they are sophists. For these claim to teach, in addition to other things, not only the use of words, but morals also, and they assert that political philosophy is their peculiar field. Let us leave aside, for the moment, the question whether this is true or not. But while I applaud them for aspiring to such high pretensions, I should applaud them still more if they did not utter falsehoods and convict themselves of thinking one thing and teaching their pupils another. What! Was it not the gods who revealed all their learning to Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Isocrates and Lysias? Did not these men think that they were consecrated, some to Hermes, others to the Muses? I think it is absurd that men who expound the works of these writers should dishonour the gods whom they used to honour. Yet, though I think this absurd, I do not say that they ought to change their opinions and then instruct the young. But I give them this choice: either not to teach what they do not think admirable, or, it they wish to teach, let them first really persuade their pupils that neither Homer nor Hesiod nor any of these writers whom they expound and have declared to be guilty of impiety, folly and error in regard to the gods, is such as they declare. For since they make a livelihood and receive pay from the works of those writers, they thereby confess that they are most shamefully greedy of gain, and that, for the sake of a few drachmae, they would put up with anything. It is true that, until now, there were many excuses for not attending the temples, and the terror that threatened on all sides absolved men for concealing the truest beliefs about the gods. But since the gods have granted us liberty, it seems to me absurd that men should teach what they do not believe to be sound. But if they believe that those whose interpreters they are and for whom they sit, so to speak, in the seat of the prophets, were wise men, let them be the first to emulate their piety towards the gods. If, however, they think that those writers were in error with respect to the most honoured gods, then let them betake themselves to the churches of the Galilaeans to expound Matthew and Luke, since you Galilaeans are obeying them when you ordain that men shall refrain from temple-worship. For my part, I wish that your ears and your tongues might be “born anew,” as you would say, as regards these things in which may I ever have part, and all who think and act as is pleasing to me.

For religious and secular teachers let there be a general ordinance to this effect: Any youth who wishes to attend the schools is not excluded; nor indeed would it be reasonable to shut out from the best way boys who are still too ignorant to know which way to turn, and to overawe them into being led against their will to the beliefs of their ancestors. Though indeed it might be proper to cure these, even against their will, as one cures the insane, except that we concede indulgence to all for this sort of disease. For we ought, I think, to teach, but not punish, the demented.

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Appropriate for the thread...we have here an actual person, Julian..who was re-imagined by the church as a cruel persecutor of christians and given a posthumous dishonorific.  His pointing out the effrontery of their faith (which persists to this day in exactly the same forms) necessitated that he be transformed into a legendary villain. 

If you go by the catholic churches history of the man..it reads like a demon's resume, lol.  True to type, words were placed into his mouth, "Nenikekas Galilaie", as a referendum on history. While he never said anything of the sort...I do think that the authors of that line got that one right - and the world suffered for it. With his death, any semblance of nascent secularism in the west died..and wouldn't be seen again for over a thousand years.