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View Full Version : A rebuttal of Zeitgeist




Pistis
02-20-2009, 10:29 AM
Yet another one!

By Charles Lehmann (in a KFUO interview) this time: It's well worth reading because of it's excellent insight into the schizophrenic nature of post-modern philosophy, i.e. the idea that there is no absolute truth, there is no objective morality and good and evil are simply subjective moral judgements, so good or evil can be whatever you judge it be



What does Zeitgeist say about Jesus?

Jesus is a fictional construct, another version of a myth that has been told in many cultures and many religions. You should look at the entire Bible as an astrological apologetic and none of the things that happened in the Bible ever happened.

What is the argument of Zeitgeist?

All of the things we believe and trust are propaganda that's been imposed on us by some external structure and the way we view the world is false in every meaningful way and that is the spirit of our age, the Zeitgeist.

What is the worldview of Zeitgeist?

It is a good embodiment of post-modern philosophy. The Hermeneutic of Distrust is central in post-mordern philosophy: that you can't trust anything that has been told you and that the best way for you to approach the world is to be sceptical of everything, even the things that seem self-evident.
So post-modernist historians will go back through everything that has gone before and try to show how though some of the facts you've been told may be correct, they've been interpreted in a way that serves the power structures of the day: religion and state. These are the two main targets but it can go beyond that, marriage, anything that's ever been referred to as an institution, post-modernism is going to be trying to undercut.

Can I apply Hermeneutics of Distrust to Zeitgeist itself? (i.e. to distrust what Zeitgeist says)

Post-modernists would hope that you wouldn't do that. Post-modernism is really never about building anything, it's always about tearing things down. The movie is very rhetorically sophisticated, it's very good at presenting the information it claims to be true. e.g. it lists all the pagan deities and lists all the similarities between them and Christianity in a nonstop, numbing way.
But it is lying about almost every detail it presents. This really is the post_modernist approach, it tries to deconstruct everything you believe to the point where you are so empty that it can put whatever in that it wants to put in.

My comment: Great point especially since Zeitgeist Addendum follows Zeitgeist by spouting a pro Marxist political agenda and a NewAge/Theosophical religious agenda


Movie Summary

The movie makes an attempt to offer proof but it gives no real citations that are trustworthy for any of the data that it asserts and it simply doesn't present the material it presents in an honest way. e.g. when the movie begins to speak about Christ it begins by talking about the mythology of the Egyptian Horus - it make all kinds of assertions about Horus, only a third of which can actually be verified.

They try to establish that in every culture that was present before the time of Christ you had a story that was almost identical to the story you had in the NT so they are various versions of the same story and none of them are trustworthy. The problem with that is that there are lots of factual errors
- there is no absolutely no evidence in any text about Horus that he was crucified; no citation or evidence in the movie to support the assertion

What does it present as the real truth?

The final point it wants to leave you with about Christianity is that the purpose of Christianity is to keep the religious establishment in power and they want to have control of the way you think, of the way you behave.
Post-modernism is always about power: anyone who has power shouldn't have power and anyone who doesn't have power is simply being oppressed - it ends up being a fatalistic approach.
It is also trying to deconstruct government in exactly the same way, i.e. you have no freedom, any freedom you think you have is a lie, the government is using all of this sophisticated conspiracies to keep you in line and keep you in control so that this oligarchy can remain in power and you'll never be able to live the life that you should be able to live.

Host's comment: This is part of the problem with the conspiracy theory itself: it seems everything becomes evidence for the theory, even those things that seem to speak against it because they become part of the misinformation that supports the lie and they cannot be disproven.

This is the greatest lie of post-mordernism. One of the most important post-modernist philosophers wrote of this concept he made called the Panopticon - it's this tower, you don't know it's there consciously but in the way you behave you do and it's the idea that there is someone watching everything you do, everything you say, everything you consider and you know that if that Panopticon sees you doing you something contrary to what it wants you to be doing, then it's going to use all of this institutions to try to correct you and bring you back into line. So we are all slaves of the Panopticon even though we can't see it. And in post-modernism if you've got that kind of construct, then the question becomes: How can you get out of it? That's something that the post-modern philosophers have never been able to answer because they're so oppressed and so fatalistic.

If the movie is trying to destroy everything that we believe, then what is replacing it?

Good question because it gets to the heart of anything that is founded in deconstructionism, the whole point of the philosophy is to get rid of everything, it doesn't actually try to replace it with anything. It's only purpose is to destroy what is there.

How do we respond to the contention that this movie makes that Christianity is just another in a long line of myths that men have believed? And Christianity as we have it today is a result of all this myths bunched together for western civilization?

The best way to respond to it is to lay out what the facts of the matter actually are. Basic research shows that the assertions being made by the movie don't hold up. The antiquity of a lie doesn't really give you any reason to believe the lie. Most of the documentation for the few things in the movie that do have something to them are all post-Christian - they come from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th centuries and later. This says that if one thing is derivative of another, it is that this pagan mythologies are trying to gain some legitimacy by imitating Christianity and not the other way around. Almost all the so-called evidence comes from after Christ's acension, after the NT was written and circulated into all of this different areas.

Any honest look at the evidence is going to show that the claims that this movie is making simply doesn't hold any water at all.

References for further study:

www.alwaysbeready.com

Book: Re-inventing Jesus, what the Davinci Code and other novel speculations don't tell you