The Bible does not teach any Zeus-like figure being responsible
for casting lightning. But God is responsible in the sense that in
creation week He established the laws of nature. And mind you, it
was the Biblical worldview that paved the way for modern science
and did away with superstitious ideas. Had it not been Christians
like Michael Faraday who knows you may still be believing in Zeus
today! See http://creation.com/the-creationist-basis-for-modern-science
Yes, I agree with you that humans have created many gods in
their own human image. But I am not talking about such gods. I am
talking about GOD, the one who created humans in His image.
BTW, as an atheist please answer the question of who created
humans.
Christianity is just a broken off religion from Judaism.
Judaism has it's origins in Greece.
The extraordinary
similarity has, of course, been observed before. It is
greatly to be regretted that many commentators brought baggage
of their
own to the debate. Hence, early Christian fathers believed that
the devil had
imitated Christian ritual to lead people astray. During the
Reformation, the
existence of Pagan ritual in the Catholic Church was one of the
central
complaints of Protestants – although this paper will seek to
show that a
fundamental similarity of doctrine with Paganism still exists in
both
Churches. Later Christian commentators suggested – more
convincingly –
that perhaps there is a very narrow range of ritual to which
human beings
cleave. Or else they admitted there must have been
cross-contamination, but
that the essentials of Christianity were untouched. Around the
turn of the
twentieth century, a school of ‘debunkers’ seized upon the same
similarities
to try to demonstrate that Jesus was a mere allegory and never
existed, and
that Christianity was, in fact, nothing more than a pagan sect
itself. Their
determination to fit this quart into a pint pot gave rise to
tortuous arguments
– such as attempts to equate the term ‘the Lamb of God’ with the
‘age of
Aries’, and the later Christian fish symbol with the ‘age of
Pisces’. With the
decline of traditional Christian worship – just as the required
objectivity
became possible – interest has waned, and little study on the
subject has
been done at all in recent times.
In this monograph, therefore, the facts are allowed to speak
for
themselves. The parallels between pagan and
Christian ritual are obvious,
4
and
intrinsically interesting. What they do demonstrate is the
durability of
ritual, long
after the original rationale behind it has disappeared. They
also
tell us
something about the nature of human belief, and the elements
(raised
emotion,
distinctive costume, the reassuringly familiar combined with
the
striking and
unusual), which, apparently, help to support and maintain
it.
http://www.i-c-r.org.uk/publications/monographarchive/Monograph38.pdf
