DISCUSSIONS ABOUT ZOROASTRIANISM
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# 57) Q:  I'm not going to argue. I believe very strongly in what I believe, but I do not know enough about Zoroastrianism right now to argue well. I would like to have a discussion about it when I do know it well, though. I will only explain something... One thing I wish is that the author had put more faith in the religion he started out in. You cannot claim to be a Christian if you don't fully believe in the Jehovah God who sent JESUS, not Zoroaster, as the ultimate sacrifice. If you can be swayed so easily into another religion that, although similar, is obviously NOT the same as Christianity or Judaism, then you never really believed it in the first place. You just learned it and never had STRONG faith in it. To claim to be Christian, you must believe that because you make mistakes (like lying, murdering, lusting, etc...i.e. sin), you deserve to die. Jews believe this, too, so they sacrifice animals, like lambs, that don't have scratches or cuts or mutations. Their sacrifices are perfect when they put them on the altar to make up for their sins; this was required by God. God promised the Jews that one day he would send his son (1/3 of the trinity) as the perfect sacrifice for ALL of humanity. This would be a gift of love given to all of humanity for forgiveness as long as they would acknowldge the fact that the forgiveness came through His son. Christians believe that Jesus was perfect and at the same time- human and God. The one difference b/w Jews and Christians is that Jews don\'t accept Jesus as the son of God and Christians do. It was prophesied in the old testament that the Jewish religion would not accept their own savior, so that isn\'t surprising. God still considers the Jews "His people" and loves them; He doesn\'t favor Christians. He actually tells us in the Bible that if we hate Jews, we'll be hated by Him. I would encourage anyone who reads this site to also consider Christianity. Like in all religions, there are nuts who go off on tangents, but if you would like more information that is totally Bible-based (if it isn't, may God smite me where I sit in my computer chair!!), I will try to answer any questions. I can answer many questions; if I don't know an answer, then I'll pray about it and if that doesn't help, I'll go ask my preacher/priest/guy-who-knows-more-scripture-than-I-ever-will.  I will not condemn you, or make you feel stupid. The first rule of being a Christian is to love!! I am not just a follower in my religion, I am a DO-er.

A: Swayed easily? How easily we judge others without knowing them, when we have bought into narrow minded dogmas?   I do not have to tell you this, but for your information. I was an extremely militant Evangelical Xian for the better part of 2 decades. I studied in Xian seminaries and hold a Masters from a Xian University, in Religious Studies/Divinity. I conducted missionary campaigns, both in the States and abroad, ran  a home visitation ministry, preached on street corners and Cathedrals, ran and taught  Sunday schools and 'converted' hundreds and hundreds if not thousands. I am conversant in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, and know a lot more about the Bible than most 'pastors'. But according to your Xian Dogma, I am not supposed to think, nor have my questions answered in a credible way, I am supposed to ignore the blatant theological contradictions  and worship a flawed idea of God, just because a book, which included thousands of myths from other cultures and whose main theological assumptions can either be proven out and out to be wrong, or have patently borrowed from other religions and adapted to its imagery, is claimed to be the infallible word of god!

But I welcome discussion,  provided of course, all arguments are sourced and not invented out of whole cloth or referred to the Bible as proof! Look at all the claims I made in the prior paragraph, for example. I can tell you exactly where in the Bible, or related literature my sources are and why they are true, if its not immediately self evident. Shall I demonstrate?

1st claim. We are not supposed to think. Proverbs 3.5 ( Which in different translations advices us to not lean on our thoughts or on our own understanding)

2nd claim. To the question about evil and how can a good God  allow it, the 'answers' are not credible , nor do they make sense. These are, generally, basing themselves in 2 points which, upon examination, are unsustainable by Xian theology, namely: God did not create evil , but Satan is the author of it and man has free will and chooses evil out of his 'fallen' nature. In the first instance, if God, which according to Xian theology is loving, all knowing and all powerful , would have created an entity that would have become Satan,  all the following would apply:
1. God would have known that such an entity ( in this case a messenger of God ( that is the meaning of angel) was going to be the author of evil, before God created this Satan ( Adversary).
2. Moreover, as all powerful , God would have the power not to create this Satan,  or to create him good, or to prevent him from becoming the author of evil.
3. Furthermore, being love itself,  God could not allow this author of evil to harm His beloved, if he foreknew his destiny and had the power to prevent it. In short , my Xian friend, either God is not like the Bible and Xian theology describes Him, that is, He is either not all knowing, not all powerful  and/or not love, or he is a monster God, that creates an adversary, knowing such a Satan would author evil and corrupt his beloved creatures, created in His own image.

Having for centuries (since this discussion of flawed Xian theology is not new) been unable to answer this question in a credible way, Xian theology attempts to hide behind free will. Man chooses, Satan chose,  and they are, thusly, the artificers of their fall into sin. But this argument does not hold water either. For an All Knowing, All Powerful and Loving deity, obviously, would have the knowledge, power and love to either create man in ways that would not make him 'fallen', or to create men with the purpose not to obey blindly without knowledge ( since man cannot have proven knowledge of even the existence of God beyond all doubt), not as an image of God, but, as He has created all things, undeveloped , immature forms, that they may grow into maturity in spirit and become, not  be made de facto, into God's likeness. I mean.  it does not take a human genius, let alone a God, to see this. If the God of Abraham, is the God that is Love of the New Testament, He would not be the wrathful God, that seeks vengeance,  nor would He be the unjust one, who visits the evil of the fathers upon the sons. Nor would he deem men He, Himself, made fallible an erred, as worthy of eternal condemnation and torture, for torture is what torment is. Rather, he would be true to his loving nature and teach and nurture His immature 'children' that they make grow into spiritual adulthood and become, like him, Love.

That, in similar terms, is what  Mazda Ahura, Wisdom's Lord, the Wise God and Lord has established. But since this view of God has come to Xianity through the prism of heretical versions of  the Good Faith ( Zarathushtra's teaching) and through the additional filter of Early Judaism with its bloody sacrifices and God ordained genocides, your theology is not consistent logically, presenting a distorted and unbelievable picture of God. But instead of doing the right thing, that is, instead of jettisoning the Early Judaism and interpreting God in valid ways, the Xian establishment has for millennia circled the wagons around indefensible dogmas, high sounding but empty words, superstition and traditions of men.

Third claim. Xian theology is patently contradictory. Just to take one contradiction. It claims that God does not change; that Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. That means that 'Yahweh' is just another name for the Father and that he is the same God of Love. The question is then: Why does the God of Love order Genocide? Why does he create fallible men, that he loves and then tortures most of them in an inferno of fire for all eternity? Why does he allow evil, being love and having all power to stop it? Clearly these are contradictory and flawed ideas of God.

Fourth claim.The Bible is far from being the Word of God. It contains verifiable, Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian influence and out and out copied and re-arranged stories. From Noah's flood, to the garden of Eden to the angels among men, to Job and more.

Fifth Claim. The Exodus , for example, the very backbone of Old Testament religion, is a myth. If you were to study the very facts, either provided clearly by the Bible, or implied by what it says in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, you would have to agree with scholars, which are obliged to put the number of supposed exiles from Egypt well into the hundreds of thousands. Indeed, since women nor children are mentioned,  it could easily be several million. The "Infallible" Bible claims that this huge number of people trekked some 40 years around the Sinai peninsula, one of the most  barren and inhospitable places on Earth. The Bible attempts to get around this impossibility, by resorting, as it always does when the plain facts as presented by itself are just too incredible to believe, to miracle, Manna from heaven, water from rocks, clothes and shoes that are worn for decades and do not wear down, etc.

However, there is one thing , that the apologists and  the original compilers of this Mythical trek have forgotten and want to ignore. Men produce waste, garbage etc. They use and discard utensils, they eat animals and leave bones behind. Hundreds of thousands, trekking through the Sinai, would have left clear and most abundant remains of this sort, thus providing prima facie and undeniable evidence, for the 'truth' of the story. Guess what, my Xian friend? Archeologists have been combing the Sinai for centuries from every nation on Earth and they all have failed to find such evidence. In fact the book "The View from Mount Nebo" frames the present debate and dilemma of Jewish archeology in detail. Now, these are Jews. The Exodus is not only assumed theology to them, it is supposedly part of their history. However, as the book points out, there is no evidence for the Exodus, forcing many otherwise orthodox and devout Jews to recognize this fact and reinterpret their own history and religion in mythological terms. So much for Biblical accuracy and infallibility  and this is but one example!!!

Sixth Claim. This is the most glaring of all indictments against the supposed inspiration of the Bible. At least, it was most glaring to me. The Bible is held to be infallible, its doctrines , specially New Testament ones, are held, basically, to be reality and the will of God. Yet such doctrines as Resurrection, Hell, Heaven, Redemption, Messiah, Apocalypse etc; are not, Xian nor Jewish for that matter, that is, they are not, originally, Biblical. By merely perusing the Young Avesta and the Pahlavi literature, which all  predate, in their original form, the New Testament,  one can confirm most of this. In the pages of the Young Avesta, which predate the Achaemenians by at least several Centuries and are thus older than even the outrageous claims for Isaiah and other prophets by some Biblicists, one can find the Virgin birth of a saviors, resurrection, heaven, hell, Fiery tests aping the supposed Lake of Fire of the NT, an apocalypse. Messiahs etc, Indeed the very Bible, calls Cyrus, the Persian Emperor, Messiah, taken of the hand by Yahweh, Shepherd of Israel and savior. The Jews before the exile had no heaven or hell, no resurrection, no fiery torment lake etc. They had no Satan, that is, no adversary to God. All this were present in Persian religion and appear later in the Bible, especially in the New Testament.

Demon possession was unheard of in the OT before the Exile, yet it is all over the NT, as it is all over the Young Avesta and the Pahlavi writings of Persian religion, were they originated. The Jewish devil, such as he was presented, if at all, in Job ( Not a canonical book for Jews by the way) as God's servant, an angel, that God uses and does not oppose God, but accuses men. Yet in Xianity he becomes Satan the adversary, just as Ahriman is the adversary of God in the deviated Persian religion of Exile times. The clincher? Well Jesus , himself, is said to have called Satan Beelzebub, meaning Lord of the Flies. This is a verbatim rendition of one of the epithets of Ahriman /Angrah Mainyu,  the Persian devil, addressed to it hundreds, if not thousands of years before Christ ever walked the earth. I can only point out, my Xian friend, that there are a lot more evidences. The Maggii are not astrologers or Wise men, they are a Common Greek word ( Koine Greek, was a universal language at the time of Christ) for Persian priests. Also, I am covering only Persian influence , but there is plenty of evidence for Babylonian and Egyptian influence and I have not even mentioned Mithraism, which probably is the most influential of all. That takes care of, but, my six claims above. But there are many more than six claims that can be substantiated against Xianity , we can discuss all of them if you wish.

As to your attempt to explain to me Xian theology and the Bible. I repeat, I, not only know it, I taught it and preached it. There is no need to explain it to me. I dare say I know it better than you and I practiced it and taught it until my conscience and mind could not, in all honesty, swallow it any more, or tell it to others when there were no answers to the most simple and valid questions about its theology. I have more than examined the Bible and its claims and found them wanting. To believe that God demands blood, is in itself an abomination to Zarathushtis.  To claim that the innocent has to die for the guilty is an insult. It defies sane visions of reality. Even, supposedly, depraved men, 'guilty', corrupted and useless, as Paul ( Not , interestingly, Christ)  depicts men, are revolted by the sheer injustice of the innocent dying for there guilty. If we, immature, creatures have enough sense to be utterly opposed to this, how much more the All Wise, All Good is revolted by such wrongful theology? More over,  may I ask, if the pay for 'sin' is death, as Paul claims: Do insects, microbes plants and unthinking animals 'sin'? They certainly do die. Or is this another, and shinning, example of the 'justice' of the Xian God? All these must die because one day one man supposedly 'sinned'?  Must we all die because some assumed first man 'sinned"? Or is it because this is just a temporal ( in the physical) reality we live in?

Another question, you are always claiming that men need salvation and a savior. The reason for a savior we already hinted at. Paul claims that we are so perverted we cannot do good, ( Never mind the millions of selfless individuals that do good every day) and in need of someone  that is not perverted and thus 'sinless; so that he can die for us ( again an abomination to our Zarathushtrian theology) But, have you asked yourself, from whom or from what are we to be saved? If we are to be saved, as the Bible teaches, from hell, condemnation and eternal torment, then who created hell, who condemns us, who gives us eternal torment? The answer, is that the condemnator, the author of hell, and the one who tortures men for eternity is none other than the God of Abraham!!!

You also subscribe to such Pablium as that, God has a chosen people , which , conveniently , is you. First that is a direct contradiction , yes another one, of the Bible:  **These and all Biblical quotations are, for convenience, from The New Standard Revised Version ( 1989) But are similar , if not even more damning, in other versions. For we read as follows: Deuteronomy 10.17 " For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords,  ( a designation given all Persian Emperors , by the way) the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe." Acts 10.34 " Then Peter began to speak to them: " I truly understand that God shows no partiality. "  Romans 2.11 " For God shows no partiality."  Gal 2.6 " ... God shows no partiality ... "  Ephesians 6.9 " ... for you know that  both of you have the same Master in heaven, and with Him there is no partiality." Col. 3.25 " For the wrongdoer will be paid back for whatever wrong he has done, and there is no partiality."  James 2.1 " Or do you hold the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with partiality?: *&  2.9. " For if you show partiality you commit sin ..." But the clincher, my Xian friend, is 1 Peter 1.17 which reads: " If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds ..." God is impartial He does not play favorites. in other words he does not show partiality and therefore cannot  have a chosen people. He is, to quote the Bible, the God of All (Numbers 16.22, Deuteronomy 10.17, 2 S amuel 7.22, 22.32, 1 Chronicles 16.26, Job 9.2. Psalms 47.7 and plenty more in the OT, never mind the NT)

Sure in the Bible it is claimed that God has chosen some and not others, but that is just another of a zillion of contradictions that are really too numerous, and too tedious, to fully record here. Thus the claims for infallibility and Word of God for the Bible are empty claims. You can, of course choose, like the Bible tells you, not to lean on your thoughts and accept whatever Pablium the powers that be want to feed you. But let me warn you, a faith that is not capable of surviving even the most simple of questions to its doctrines and whose theology is logically invalid, cannot be true and, furthermore, a faith that is not questioned, deeply and often, is one that is not worth holding.

# 58) Q: I would like to know what the outlook is of people raised in this kind of religion? also what is the approach towards people wanting to convert? I would like to understand more of what goes on in this religion

A: Thanks for your questions and inquiries. We all love questions, because  it gives us an opportunity, to give information. Questions have a very dear place in the Good Faith, for Zarathushtra always asked questions.

The outlook of a Zoroastrian is one of Optimism, because Mazda is All Good. One of Perseverance against all odds, because the fight against wrong is very long and  difficult. One of study, because it is with knowledge that Good Mind can discern Righteousness. One of Prayer because the support of our Soul Mate is needed. One of Progress towards Completion for that is the will of the Most Wise and leads to bliss. One of Meditation because our best understanding is needed to Deliver Wrong unto Righteousness.

It is also, one of respect for we are all fellow student sin the university of life and the most Wise and Supreme Being does not discriminate among mortals , neither for their race, nor for their sex, nationality, nor class. It is also one, dedicated to tolerance because the wrongful are not evil just ignorant of the truth and we all share in lack of knowledge and certainty about some things and must, all, learn.

It is a happy outlook, because our God, besides All Good, is benignant and loving not condemning but teaching, the God of the eternal second chance, who does not deny nor contradict His nature.  It is a life of freedom , freedom from guilt, for we are not all transgressors, nor guilty of evil or of the sacrifice of an innocent for our crimes. Freedom from fear , for we are not condemned,  nor are we fallen, or  depraved. Neither will we be tormented in a hell. Freedom from 'sin' because to a Zoroastrian to sin is to err and to redeem sin is to correct your error, sin is not a power that enslaves but a mistake born of our ignorance of Asha and Mazda.

Zarathushtra taught that the Good Consciousness , is the religion of humanity, a Good Faith for all to follow, of their own informed choice. But it is not a religion of passive belief, or of avoiding evil. It is a proactive faith, whose practitioners must actively combat wrong with right , ignorance with knowledge, selfishness with selflessness, and oppression with rehabilitation. Thus it is not for wall flowers. Neither is it a faith that prescribes the minutest details of human behaviors and practices. But, it is one who teaches us to think , reflect and choose according to the Principles of Life, given to us by Zarathushtra in the Gathas. Thus is not a religion for those that do not seek self reliance, nor for those that wish to be told what to do at every point of their lives. Neither is it a religion for those to seek absolution for their thoughts, words and deeds. For a Zoroastrian is responsible for all three and for spreading his belief to all those that want to listen. It is thus a religion, for those who understand , that, no one else is responsible for your behavior or your life but you. Hopefully all these examples gives you a glimpse of what the Good Faith is all about.

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