Comment on Daily reminder that the good old days of the Empire weren't THAT good...
PugJesus@piefed.social 2 days agoIf Christianity was so virulent, why didn’t Judaism do the same thing?
Because Judaism actively discourages converts, even (or even especially) at that early point; while Christianity has proselytization as one of its highest and most important values.
Judaism’s conception of the afterlife is often unclear; Christianity always posited a very clear conception of heaven and eternal torture, with the latter reserved for everyone who did not accept Jesus Christ.
Judaism is an extremely chauvinist ethnoreligion which regards belonging to the ethnic group as necessary to (and often synonymous with) participation in the faith; Christianity is a theoretically culture-neutral faith which regards personal participation and association as the main signifier.
The core faith of Christianity is contained within a fairly small number of fairly simple holy texts written for the purpose of outreach which claim to be divinely inspired, while the core faith of both Temple and Rabbinical Judaism is predicated on an extensive corpus of legal and philosophical disputes which are not immediately intuitive to outsiders or newcomers.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
Nah. Jesus said the only path to eternal life is through Him. That implies that if you die a sinner, you go to Sheol and just burn up into nothing.
A lot of people think Christianity has eternal torture because the King James Bible translates the words Sheol and Hades both as Hell. But Jesus was saying two different words. Now, there are multiple different ways to interpret the word Hades, and My take is not a popular one. But since the Bible is polytheistic, I believe that when Jesus says Hades, he actually fucking means Hades. The Greek underworld, ruled over by the god of death. Which already had eternal torture for many thousands of years at that point.
I submit as further evidence the fable of Lazarus and the rich man. Jesus says the rich man died and went to Hades, and then asked the angel of the Lord if he could come to heaven instead. But the angel said “nah fam, can’t do it. It’s against the rules”. I think Yahweh couldn’t save the rich man after death, because he had passed into Hades’ realm.
Anyway, the point is Christianity didn’t invent the eternal torture thing, and actively rejected it in other places.
PugJesus@piefed.social 2 days ago
That directly contradicts numerous lines about a negative afterlife even in the Gospels alone. Unless “nothing” can weep and gnash their teeth, at which point “nothing” starts to sound an awful lot like “something”.
That would have additional problems, both in that the New Testament was written at a point when Judaism had become aggressively monotheistic, not merely monolatrous, that Hades is not innately a place of punishment, and that traditional Greek religion was not thousands of years old at that point.
But it was a core piece of the faith and its holy texts, and, unlike previous religions, posits the existence of eternal torture to punish non-believers, not those who committed evil.
What.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 2 days ago
Matthew 25:46. The righteous go to heaven and live forever. The cruel suffer a punishment that is eternal and is not life. Id est: eternal nonexistence. That’s the rejection of the eternal torture narrative, which comes from Greek religion.
And yes, the Hellenic religion was a little under a thousand years old at that point. But the Mycenaean religion also featured an underworld presided over by a god of the dead (and, perhaps a goddess of the dead for even longer than that). In the Hellenic interpretation of this underworld, at least, everyone goes down under when they die, but one’s deeds in life and one’s funerary rites determine their place within the underworld. Those whose deeds in life violated the Hellenes’ most important moral values were tormented forever in Tartarus. Notable examples include Sisyphus and Tantalus.
PugJesus@piefed.social 2 days ago
That presumes that the opposite of life is nonexistence, whereas the widespread notion of an afterlife in the period and region posits that the opposite of life is death, not nonexistence. Furthermore, that, again, does not address the question of how “nothing” can weep and gnash its teeth; and, on top of that, is in direct contradiction to Your assertion of Hades as a destination for unbelievers.
That is not in any way supported by Biblical or historical scholarship. For that matter, Greek religion is very often, like Judaism, hazy on the question of an afterlife, and this is an issue often discussed by Greek philosophical musings of the period.
It’s extremely questionable to insist on an interpretation based on the exact terminology of “Hades” and then admit that “Tartarus” is the term for what You are describing.