Wow, wrong on all fronts. First, there’s very little, if anything, that can be known about the historical Jesus, so that would be a slender basis for Christianity.
Second, saying that Christianity is based on Judaism but not paganism is the politically correct view that overcompensates for how New Testament studies were dominated by Germans before WWII. In any case, it’s futile since Judaism was largely Hellenistic in classical antiquity, due to the impact of Alexander the Great, as I pointed out in the article linked below. Notice how the early Christians relied on the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures) and wrote the New Testament in Greek.
Christianity is centered on the dying and rising godman mytheme which was pagan long before Christians found a way to Judaize it. Justin Martyr conceded this when he said, “if anybody objects that [our god] was crucified, this is in common with the sons of Zeus (as you call them) who suffered, as previously listed.”
As Richard Carrier points out, ‘The dying-and-rising son (sometimes daughter) of god “mytheme” originated in the ancient Near East over a thousand years before Christianity and was spread across the Mediterranean principally by the Phoenicians (Canaanites) from their base at Tyre (and after that by the Carthaginians, the most successful Phoenician cultural diffusers in the early Greco-Roman period), and then fostered and modified by numerous native and Greco-Roman cults that adopted it. The earliest documented examples are the cult of Inanna and Dumuzi (also known as Ishtar and Tammuz), the cult of Baal and Anat, and the cult of Marduk (also known as Bel or Baal, which basically meant “the Lord”), all of whose resurrection stories are told in Sumerian, Ugaritic and Assyrian tablets (respectively) long predating the advent of Christianity.’
“These cults then influenced the development of others in the Greco-Roman era, including the cult of a resurrected Adonis.” Moreover, “the savior cult of the resurrected Zalmoxis (of Thracian origin) is clearly attested in Herodotus centuries before Christianity; the imperial cult of the resurrected Romulus is likewise attested in several pre-Christian authors; and the Egyptian savior cult of the resurrected Osiris is likewise undeniably ancient.”
What the Jews who became Christians added to that mytheme was a satirical bent since now it was a lowly representative of conquered Judaism who was the surprising hero that triumphs in the end against all odds.
Early-modern humanism was based on a return to the Greco-Roman classics, a return that bypassed Church censorship, spin, and dogma. Just as Christianity syncretized Judaism and Greco-Roman culture, early modern humanists syncretized Christianity and that preexisting pagan culture. And just as Christianity was reacting against the Roman Empire that had destroyed Jerusalem, humanists reacted against the corrupt, stagnant Western Church.
You insinuated that I don’t acknowledge historical facts out of dishonesty, which is lame and beneath you.
You’re treating moral statements like ordinary descriptions, which falls afoul of the naturalistic fallacy and the open question argument. Values shouldn’t be so disconnected from reality that they’re impossible to realize, so indeed they must be informed by the facts. But they’re not made true or false just by citing those facts. As David Hume pointed out, you’d have to smuggle in a prescription in the supposed description of facts to show that a prescription or proscription logically follows from that bogus set of pure descriptions.
You don’t think humanists have a reason why we should rebel against nature? It’s implicit in the entire impetus behind the move to sedentary societies. We domesticated ourselves, in building artificial environments to which we could adapt, raising our living standard, and enriching what anthropologists call our behavioural modernity, our use of symbols in the arts and sciences. We became more deeply personal and godlike, and less wild and animalistic by switching to intelligently designed environments that cater more to our needs and transhuman aspirations.
And in hindsight, we can say that that move was based on unconscious fear and loathing of nature’s wild, indiscriminate aspects. The moral values of humanism (the celebration and protection of personhood) are supplemented by aesthetic ones, namely disgust for nature’s wildness, godlessness, absurdity, inhumanity, and amorality. We revolted against those aspects of nature, by building anti-natural alternatives to natural environments (cities, kingdoms, empires, along with languages, worldviews, and cultures).
