Hello Miss Megan. I agree with you. Large chunks of the Old Testament have been copied from older Mesopotamian sources. The creation story is clearly based on
Enuma Elish. The Flood story is a revamped version of
Gilgamesh. Story of Moses is modeled after the biography of
Sargon the Great - the basket in the river and all. The Old Testament laws were modeled after the
Ur-Nammu and later
Hammurabi law codes - which was possibly copied from Urukagina's, but that text didn't survive.
Moving on to the New Testament, the whole die-for-your-sins idea is clearly a reheated
Osiris story, and John's gospel is so
Gnostic it's truly surprising that it was not thrown to the Apocrypha pile when the canon of the Bible was being decided.
I wish humanity invented writing earlier than it did. Then, maybe we could trace the religion lineage all the way to
the oldest temple on earth, and understand the evolution of religions better.
Exactly. Maybe this lovely community is correct, but maybe they are wrong and the Baha'i are correct. Or maybe the Suhrawardiyya Sufi Muslims are the ones who got it right, and everyone else is wrong. Or maybe only some random shamanistic Siberian tribe is right. Or maybe all religions are wrong and have been invented to bring comfort for in times of suffering, and to keep masses in control of the elites?
This is a very interesting vision. A god weeping when people kill each other in his name. Tell me, does he not interfere in all of these mass murders because he can't, or because he doesn't want to - he prefers weeping over action?
True. We are just lab rats in God's laboratory. He doesn't care about individual rats, He's just observing an experiment.
...Of course, then I remember Hell and I'm afraid I'm going there for my heretic thoughts.