In 1803 the original church of the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts became a Unitarian Church.
The Pilgrims, like the Puritans who came in slightly later, were rigid Old Testament Calvinists. They talked very little about Christ’s Mercy. They concentrated on the vengeful, merciless JHWH, what we call Jehovah, of the Old Testament.
But the Pilgrim version of Jehovah didn’t just kill people wholesale as he did in the Old Testament. The Pilgrim Jehovah was merciless in sending almost everybody to Hell for eternity. Christ’s Mercy was a tiny asterisk at the end of the Old Testament.
So by 1803 the Pilgrims gave up Jesus completely and became Unitarians. To Unitarians, Jesus is just another prophet.
I seem to be only person who has noticed that Moslems are also Unitarians. “Allah” just means “God” in Arabic. They accept the Old Testament, and their Allah is Jehovah.
The Christian Maltese called their God “Allah” too.
When you concentrate so much on Jehovah, like so many fundamentalist Christians do, you begin to look at the New Testament as an asterisk on the Old Testament. Many who call themselves Christians are, in my opinion, Jehovists.
I hold to the faith of my own ancestors as my own Old Testament. Odinism was a primitive attempt to find the truth, just as the Old Testament is. The Magi were the clergy of the largest monotheistic faith of their day, Zoroastrianism. The Magi knew nothing of the Old Testament, but they accepted Christ while the Jews rejected Him. The holy book of the Magi was the Vesta.
It seems to me a natural developement that the Pilgrims became Unitarians. The Puritans also became largely Unitarian and then they became fanatical leftists. Their Christianity disappeared, but their fanaticism stayed.
#1 by Fun Quote on 10/20/2004 - 4:52 am
“The State is not ‘abolished’, it withers away.”
Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring
#2 by Elizabeth on 10/21/2004 - 3:36 pm
Zoroastrianism is actually a “reform” of Mazdaism, which is much older. The basic ideas of both — light=good, truth=good, lies=bad — were all over the “civilized world” from about 500 B.C. onwards. Some of this came directly into Christianity, but more of it came in indirectly through the Greek philosophers (Plato, for example)as several of the early Church fathers had Classical educations (Paul, Augustine of Hippo, and such), and some of it came through Judaism (see the Book of Psalms, Proverbs, and other later-written books of the Old Testament). One of early Christianity’s competitors was a religion called Mithraism, which comes directly from Zoroastrianism: Mithraism was carried all over the Roman Empire by its soldiers. Mithraism’s fatal flaw was that it was restricted to men only.
#3 by Don on 10/21/2004 - 6:01 pm
Sometimes I have actually enjoyed the visits of the religious proselytizers. One time a group of three well spoken and genetically advantaged persons visited me. We discussed various items, and they said they would return. They did, and we discussed more.
They returned a third time. About 15 minutes into this, they finally asked me the critical question: “Are we trying to convert you, or are you trying to convert us?”
Ah, to convert or to be converted, that is the question.
#4 by Bob Whitaker on 10/21/2004 - 7:33 pm
Mithraism, as you know, was the original faith of Constantine before he converted to Christianity.
Mithraiams used bread and wine in their religious services and many Christian bishops clearly did not the interconnections you talk about here, because they thought the Mithraians had stolen the bread and wine idea from Christianity.
#5 by Don on 10/22/2004 - 12:32 am
I have a hard enough time dealing with the Lutherans vs the Presbyterians, and these guys are throwing Zoroastrianism vs Mithraism at me. But if truth=good, lies=bad, these people definitely would not make good Republicans or Democrats, and certainly not good adherents to the Religion of Political Correctness. In 2004, lies=truth, bad=good is more like it.
Bread and wine is a good idea, to be sure, and I might be a bit displeased if you stole mine.
#6 by Peter on 10/22/2004 - 5:48 pm
Yes! And don’t forget the period between their rebirth as Unitarians and their becoming fanatical LIberals, when they were fanatics of “Progress.” That is, industrial and finance capitalism, and Leviathan Lincoln and his blue-grey adventure.