ZEITGEIST: The Movie

[Da'uud]

I'm seein' Robots

[Jumbo]

[skinfan133]

all i have to say is that whoever put together this 'mocumentary' of a documentary has limited knowledge of religious history and the actual bible. for instance:

-it never says 'three kings' in the bible. no tanslation as yet has ever said 'three kings'. no number is given (some scholars upon examining primary texts actually believe it was most likely 2 scholars of the far east) and they are never mentioned as kings. comparing this to the three kings stars (if they're actually called that) is like saying that since theres a spanish word 'conferencia' it must mean conference in english. only problem is its a false cognitive for 'speach' or 'lecture' in english. trying to compare phrases over 2 or more languages without any knowledge of both is dangerous business.

- who the hell believes that horus was an actual man/person who had a ministry and diciples? anyone? yeah no one of any credible background.

-Dec. 25th is NOT the day of birth of christ. anyone who has vast knowledge of religous history will tell you its really jan. 8th. some scholars even believe Jesus was born sometime in our modern month of march and was really about 30, not 32-33. the reason we celebrate dec. 25th is becuase missionaries to the british isles and germany found it convienient to substitue an exsisting pagan holiday for a Christian one. thats the only reason.

those are my three main gripes among many. i turned the movie off after minute 11. the begining part is so incredibly rediculous. they take things that do not correlate and make them seem to correlate. dig just below the surface and you see that the 'zeitgest' mountain of religious truth is really a **** pile with a glossy surface.

[NattyLight]

who the hell believes that horus was an actual man/person who had a ministry and diciples? anyone? yeah no one of any credible background.

It's exactly these type of pseudo-elitist, provencial comments that make me cringe. Of course no one currently believes in him, the religion WAS ADOPTED IN 3000 BC!! People will be saying the SAME EXACT THING ABOUT CHRISTIANITY 2000 YEARS FROM NOW!!

Anyways, let's say all of the points presented in the video were true.Hypothetically, of course. How would you react?

[PeterMP]

Truth is there is probably a lot of shady **** we don't know about. I think you can look around and get a sense that governments and institutions all subscribe to the belief that "we" shouldn't know "everything". The idea that "we" should only know a certain percentage of the truth... for our own good of course or for the ever present "national security" or something similar isn't even a foriegn concept. Many of you reading this (all or most, actually) agree with the idea.

Because of this I think this behavior is human and that provides a more reasonable theory then some big conspiracy. It's much more simple. They are all hiding a little bit because of a familiar sin - pride. They know whats best and they don't think you're as smart as they are. So they shape the truth for you and do what's best for you. They see it as the "right" thing to do and most would do the same.

No big centuries long scam. No conspiracy. Just humanity in all it's glory.

I'll agree w/ most of what you said, but maybe they are hiding a little bit because that little bit is important, and they can't tell us and keep it from our enemies.

[Koolblue13]

I'll agree w/ most of what you said, but maybe they are hiding a little bit because that little bit is important, and they can't tell us and keep it from our enemies.

If it is true and I think a good amount is, and they are keeping it from us, I don't think "enemy" is the correct word.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and discussing with some people, who are in a similar boat, thought wise, as I am. I'm starting to think Pax Americana is a good thing, but there is no way it could ever be admitted to the people. I do think the world is mostly run by a small, elite group, who have thier own best interests in mind, but it would also help the rest of us as well. Not to mention how it would help the poorest of countries, too.

[herb mul-key]

herb, I just wanted to check in and see if you believe all the claims made in this movie. Do you think all the religious, political, and economic claims made in this movie are truthful?

Not really...maybe though

[Destino]

I'll agree w/ most of what you said, but maybe they are hiding a little bit because that little bit is important, and they can't tell us and keep it from our enemies.

Or maybe they are hiding that bit because it makes them look bad? Or maybe they are hiding that bit because they fear you'll misread it and they know what's best? Or maybe they are hiding that bit because it would make someone or something look bad and right now they don't want distractions? Or maybe they are hiding that bit because it would ruin their friend which they know is really a good person? Or maybe they are just doing it to save their own ass?

The idea of holding something back, because you know better is entirely accepted by humans. Lovers do it all the time because they don't want their partner to get upset or worry. Parents do it all the time because the children need to be spared of some detail or reality. Managers do it all the time becuase they don't want it to affect employee morale or make the company look bad. Politicians do it all the time for the national interest or to shape public opinion. Religious leaders do it all the time to combat their Gods enemies or what have you.

It's done on every level of human power and relationship. It doesn't surprise me because as a Christian I accept the fact that humans are flawed and can never be anything but flawed. We will all fail and sin in some regard - while the most obvious can be avoided many are part of our very nature. Others struggle with this and maybe need to make it into a grand conspiracy, they need purpose to all the lying when perhaps there is nothing more going on then simple human pride, vanity, and willingness to lie.

[PeterMP]

It's done on every level of human power and relationship. It doesn't surprise me because as a Christian I accept the fact that humans are flawed and can never be anything but flawed. We will all fail and sin in some regard - while the most obvious can be avoided many are part of our very nature. Others struggle with this and maybe need to make it into a grand conspiracy, they need purpose to all the lying when perhaps there is nothing more going on then simple human pride, vanity, and willingness to lie.

Well, this is certainly true. Sometimes people lie for no real reason- not even vanity.

[thehogs]

I flipped ahead. If by "them" being responsible you mean that "9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration at the behest of the small group of bankers that run the Federal reserve who benefit financially from, and therefore attempt to trigger, various calamities" then the answer is yes.

At least, that's what I could piece together.

Thats what I thought. So many of these things take a pinch of facts, a pinch of 'maybes', throw in disconnected events and then make the most immense leaps in joining all these things up and presenting it as 'fact'.

And people buy it all the time

The sad thing is that they tend to hang on to an ever decreasing list of facts as showing its all 'true' whilst doing their best to ignore the reality of a poorly thought out, ill-judged, badly researched theory.

[Bounce]

Sounds like a tough sell, doesn't it? "Hey, come believe in our God! Where is he? umm... the Romans killed him."

Sounds like a tough sell, huh? So you think maybe if it was a power play, they'd come up with something better?

Besides, lining up at the coliseum steps to be eaten by Lions doesn't sound much like politicking to me... but hey, I've never been one for that kind of thing.

The power play came a couple centuries later, and you know that. But if your logic in Christianity's defense is that it's so absurd that no one would believe it if it wasn't true, I suggest you look at virtually any other religion in humanity's history. They're all full of gaping holes. Hell, even just the past couple of decades can provide plenty of voluntary death for you. You can say that the only way people would voluntarily be eaten by lions in the Coliseum is if they knew for a fact that what they believed was true, and I can say the same exact thing about committing suicide to be taken up by the UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

[PeterMP]

The power play came a couple centuries later, and you know that. But if your logic in Christianity's defense is that it's so absurd that no one would believe it if it wasn't true, I suggest you look at virtually any other religion in humanity's history. They're all full of gaping holes. Hell, even just the past couple of decades can provide plenty of voluntary death for you. You can say that the only way people would voluntarily be eaten by lions in the Coliseum is if they knew for a fact that what they believed was true, and I can say the same exact thing about committing suicide to be taken up by the UFO behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

But nobody is arguing those were power plays.

It is one thing to say that you don't believe in Christianity. It is another thing to say that Christianity was used as a way to consolidate power. That couldn't happen until the vast majority of people believed in Christianity (and it did), but by then there were older documents, that we have today, that show that the original Christians believed something AT LEAST extremely close to what we know as Christianity today.

Let me give an example. Nobody seriously doubts that Paul doesn't represent a real person that believed what he did. Paul left a position w/ at least some authority to becoming a roving "minister" that was jailed and probably eventually killed for his beliefs. Now maybe somebody came along later and used those beliefs for their benefit (and there was a period of time where the Catholic Church was doing this), but we can still go back and look at the extremely early documents and understand what Paul believed, and that has been done.

[mardi gras skin]

Not really...maybe though

Most of the stuff in that movie, I have no idea what's true and not true. But the very few things I do know about in that movie are false. And most educated people know those things are false. No one has ever made the claim that Jesus was born on December 25th. No one has ever claimed that there were "3" kings that visited Jesus. Those are popular traditions, not historical claims. These claims are so easily debunked that their inclusion in the movie shocks me.

Why would the movie's producers include these things? I can only guess that they are appealing to a subset of people with a high level of paranoia and a low level of education.

[mardi gras skin]

pseudo-elitist, provencial comments

This is an adequate description for the film. I was trying to think of the type of person who would find the claims in this movie convincing. Provincial is perfect. I'm not an expert on conspiracy theories or anything, but it seems like a more sophisticated theory would be discerning in the dots it connects.

[Ellis]

I've had a day to digest this movie and I'll say this about the steel beams of the trade center towers appearing to have been cut...

when was the picture taken? Immediately after the buildings fell? OR... was the pic taken after the clean up had began?

If the pic was taken after clean up began then it's HIGHLY LIKELY that the beam was cut on site so that they could move the debris.

Conspiracy Theory GONE.

[herb mul-key]

This is an adequate description for the film. I was trying to think of the type of person who would find the claims in this movie convincing. Provincial is perfect. I'm not an expert on conspiracy theories or anything, but it seems like a more sophisticated theory would be discerning in the dots it connects.

to me your just a wannabe elitist bible thumper, your the reason I moved away from the brainwashed citizens (not all) who live in big Metro areas, you know fast food, shop a lot, watch TV til they fall asleep, need a big house, a big car, ... can't see that they are slaves who sit in traffic....

it is so friggen typical for you and tech to put people down as "uneducated or unsophisticated"

what are you scared of...that you believe in something that is not true!

One God one truth many paths...get over it.

[Destino]

to me your just a wannabe elitist bible thumper, your the reason I moved away from the brainwashed citizens (not all) who live in big Metro areas, you know fast food, shop a lot, watch TV til they fall asleep, need a big house, a big car, ... can't see that they are slaves who sit in traffic....

it is so friggen typical for you and tech to put people down as "uneducated or unsophisticated"

what are you scared of...that you believe in something that is not true!

One God one truth many paths...get over it.

Whatever you back woods loon... go back to your compost pile if thinking critically about a internet movie is too much for you to take.

[Zguy28]

to me your just a wannabe elitist bible thumper, your the reason I moved away from the brainwashed citizens (not all) who live in big Metro areas, you know fast food, shop a lot, watch TV til they fall asleep, need a big house, a big car, ... can't see that they are slaves who sit in traffic....

it is so friggen typical for you and tech to put people down as "uneducated or unsophisticated"

what are you scared of...that you believe in something that is not true!

One God one truth many paths...get over it.

:munchout:

[techboy]

it is so friggen typical for you and tech to put people down as "uneducated or unsophisticated"

what are you scared of...that you believe in something that is not true!

To be honest, it seems to me that the only argument from emotion (such as fear or anger) in this thread is coming from the angle of "I don't like hearing people tell me that the movie I found convincing is actually riddled with errors."

As for the charge that I have "put people down", that is not my intention at all. I have not called a single person stupid, or uneducated, or anything of the sort.

What I have written is that the film is aimed at people who don't know any better, and while I guess that could be construed as insulting, I'm really not sure how else to put it.

The simple fact is that pretty much anyone who has done any reading at all in the field of Jesus history knows that virtually no serious scholar in the field argues that Jesus was not an historical person. No one. Not the atheists, not the skeptics, not the Christians. No one.

Like the time travel thing I mentioned earlier, it's not even an area of dispute, in a field where virtually everything is disputed by somebody.

So, if I say that the film is aimed at people who don't know any better, it's not meant to be insulting. It's just a fact.

If you don't believe me, try doing a little reading in the field.

For instance, Wikipedia, while not a scholarly source in itself, is sometimes a good place to get an overview and a listing of sources. Try their article on the Jesus Myth hypothesis. A telling excerpt:

The historian Michael Grant states, for example, that, "To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." - Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (Scribner, 1995)

While you're reading the article, note that of the proponents of the theory, not a one is actually an expert in the field (clicking on a person's name will take you to his or her page, which usually includes a biography). G.A. Wells, for instance, is the most prominent of the "mythers", and he is a Professor of German!

If you go through the list of "sources" for the Jesus section of Zeitgeist, you will find a similar phenomenon. Acharya S, the primary source, has a degree in mythology, not history (This seems to be a common field of study for the "Jesus mythers", and I am reminded of the old saw that if the only tool one has is a hammer, pretty soon everything begins to look like a nail ). Many of the sources cited are listed as "author", which means "I don't have any credentials, but I wrote a book!". There is not a single historian of the time period or New Testament scholar listed in the credits of Zeitgeist, and for good reason.

If you're interested in heavier reading, try this summary of a academic listserv discussing the historical Jesus. Consider, for instance, this answer by John Dominic Crossan, who is about as far from a fundamentalist Christian as one can get:

If I understand what Earl Doherty is arguing, Neil, it is that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as an historical person, or, at least that historians, like myself, presume that he did and act on that fatally flawed presumption.

I am not sure, as I said earlier, that one can persuade people that Jesus did exist as long as they are ready to explain the entire phenomenon of historical Jesus and earliest Christianity either as an evil trick or a holy parable. I had a friend in Ireland who did not believe that Americans had landed on the moon but that they had created the entire thing to bolster their cold-war image against the communists. I got nowhere with him. So I am not at all certain that I can prove that the historical Jesus existed against such an hypothesis and probably, to be honest, I am not even interested in trying.

It was, however, that hypothesis taken not as a settled conclusion, but as a simple question that was behind the first pages of BofC when I mentioned Josephus and Tacitus. I do not think that either of them checked out Jewish or Roman archival materials about Jesus. I think they were expressing the general public knowledge that "everyone" had about this weird group called Christians and their weird founder called Christ. The existence, not just of Christian materials, but of those other non-Christian sources, is enough to convince me that we are dealing with an historical individual. Furthermore, in all the many ways that opponents criticized earliest Christianity, nobody ever suggested that it was all made up. That in general, is quite enough for me.

There was one other point where I think Earl Doherty simply misstated what I did. In BofC, after the initial sections on materials and methods (1-235), I spent about equal time in Galilee (237-406) , or at least to the north, and in Jerusalem with pre-Pauline materials (407-573). I agree that if we had a totally different and irreconcilable vision/program between Paul and Q (just to take an example), it would require some very good explaining. Part of what I was doing, for example, in talking about the Common Meal Tradition was showing how even such utterly distinct eucharistic scenarios as Didache 9-10 and I Cor 11-12 have rather fascinating common elements behind and between them. It is a very different thing, in summary, for Paul to say that he is not interested in the historical Jesus (Jesus in the flesh) than to say that "no Galilee and no historical Jesus lie behind Paul."

Paragraph 3 is especially telling, I think.

One more passage by Crossan:

I am not certain, Neil, that I have much to add to my previous post. I do not claim "ideological immunity" against the possibility that the historical Jesus never existed. That such a person existed is an historical conclusion for me, and neither a dogmatic postulate nor a theological presupposition. My very general arguments are: (1) that existence is given in Christian, pagan, and Jewish sources; (2) it is never negated by even the most hostile critics of early Christianity (Jesus is a **** and a fool but never a myth or a fiction!); (3) there are no historical parallels that I know of from that time and period that help me understand such a total creation. There is, however, a fourth point that I touched on in BofC 403-406. It is crucially important for me that Jesus sent out companions and told them to do exactly what he was doing (not in his name, but as part of the Kingdom of God). The most basic continuity that I see between Jesus and those companions was, as I put it, not in mnemonics, but in mimetics. In other words, they were imitating his lifestyle and not just remembering his words. I find that emphasized in the Q Gospel’s indictment of those who talk, but do not do, and in the Didache’s emphasis on the ways (tropoi) of the Lord (not just words/logoi). When, therefore, I look at a phrase such as "blessed are the destitute," and am quite willing to argue that it comes from the historical Jesus, I am always at least as sure that it represents the accurate summary of an attitude as the accurate recall of a saying. For analogy: If Gandhi had developed a large movement after his death of people who are living in non-violent resistance to oppression, and one of them cited an aphorism of Gandhi, namely "if you do not stand on a small bug, why would you stand on a Big Bug," I would be more secure on the continuity in lifestyle than in memory and could work on that as basis.

That about sums it up, and if you know anything about Crossan, you know that (unlike me ) he is not writing from any theological bias.

Anyway, I just want to reiterate that when I say that the arguments in the film are aimed at people who don't know any better, it's not meant to be insulting. It's just a statement of fact.

Almost anyone, regardless of ideological slant, that is even passingly familiar with the current research and thinking of pretty much the entire community of scholars would immediately reject the Jesus section of this film out of hand.

[PeterMP]

to me your just a wannabe elitist bible thumper, your the reason I moved away from the brainwashed citizens (not all) who live in big Metro areas, you know fast food, shop a lot, watch TV til they fall asleep, need a big house, a big car, ... can't see that they are slaves who sit in traffic....

it is so friggen typical for you and tech to put people down as "uneducated or unsophisticated"

what are you scared of...that you believe in something that is not true!

One God one truth many paths...get over it.

This one certainly turns things on its head. Talk to anybody that is involved in any Church organization, and ask them where attendence of religious services has fallen off most severly over the last 20 years or so, and they will tell you metro areas. The Catholic Church is CLOSING churches in NYC because they can't get people to come.

[WVUforREDSKINS]

Think to yourself this: will christianity exist in 500, 1000, 2000 years? Sure, maybe as a heredic, archaic faith. That's about it.

No. I think most organized religions will be become silly stories that modern man chuckles at. Much like we do now with reguard to many ancient religions.

My best guess is that people will be very spiritual, but deny the exsistence of a god and an afterlife.

[mardi gras skin]

to me your just a wannabe elitist bible thumper, your the reason I moved away from the brainwashed citizens (not all) who live in big Metro areas, you know fast food, shop a lot, watch TV til they fall asleep, need a big house, a big car, ... can't see that they are slaves who sit in traffic....

it is so friggen typical for you and tech to put people down as "uneducated or unsophisticated"

what are you scared of...that you believe in something that is not true!

One God one truth many paths...get over it.

Herb, I'm nothing to you. I'm a few paragraphs on a message board. You can kick back on your ranch in the pacific northwest and imagine me to be anything you like. Turns out, your imaginings don't affect my life one way or the other. Enjoy your path.

[freakofthesouth]

Wow. This movie just floored me. I want to thank whoever posted it.

Look folks, the speculation on Christianity/religion will always be debatable, forever. Literally. Did anyone watch the rest of the movie?

The 9.11 theories are admirable and somewhat "done," but the bulk of the movie suggests a theory that I have never even considered- world banks and absolute power through the manipulation of money, and the increasing control of society via decreasing liberties of the individual.

Microchips? We are screwed, plain and simple. Eff it, I'm not paying taxes anymore...

[SoCalSkins]

Is this related to the Smashing Pumpkins? The name of the movie is the same as their new album and has some of the same themes.

[Mad Mike]

I still can't believe anyone is stupid enough to believe this BS. :doh: