I Recently Heard About This Wonderful Guy.

You know, I recently heard about this wonderful new guy. He died, but he is still all around us, people tell me. He was born of a virgin and had 12 disciples. He healed the sick and injured. He also resurrected from the dead, they say. In fact, that is what his name means in Hebrew (after the Hebrew Bible figure Lazarus). After he was crucified and then resurrected three days later. He is known as "the lamb," "the way," and "the light." And he died in 2,200 BC.

I'm talking about Horus, the ancient Egyptian god of healing, protection, sun and sky. I think I'll worship him. His feast day Nekhtet (which is Hebrew for festival of victory). It takes place during Season of the Emergence, or autumnal equinox, on the Egyptian calendar, which is coming up soon. I wonder what I am doing that day. Maybe I'll make plans.

 

That's amazing! Amazing people still swallow that debunked story! Where did you get your "facts"? Let me guess: Gerald Massey, 1907) (Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World? That's the same eccentric amateur Egyptologist who told us Herod, the documented King of Judea under the Romans at the time Jesus was born, was fictional and based on an Egyptian hydra serpent. There was no google search to check his facts back then, but no reputable historian takes him seriously these days. Lots of disreputable non-historians do, and have written books including his theories. Maybe you got it from one of them: Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (2005)? Or was it the late S. Acharya (aka, Dorothy Murdoch), The Christ Conspiracy (1999), who got it all from Massey. Or the maybe film Zeitgeist, which got it all from Murdoch? Or could it even be Bill Maher in his movie Religulous, who got it all from the others? They're all amateurs and non-scholarly.

You tell us Horus was born of a virgin. That's a matter of opinion and definition. After his uncle Seth chopped his father, Osiris, into pieces, his mother, Isis, reassembled them--all except for a crucial missing member, the penis. So she fashioned a magic dildo and had sex with it, producing Horus! The notion that Horus had twelve disciples comes from Massey's imaginative interpretation of a mural on an Egyptian tomb depicting twelve reapers. (If it's twelve, they must be disciples.) Horus was the god of healing, but there's no record of him healing anybody. He himself was healed by the goddess Hathor when his eye was injured. One version of the Horus myth recorded on the Metternich stele says he did fall unconsious from a scorpion bite and was revived by the god Thoth. Yet it seems he did not die. J.F. Borghouts, Ancient Egyptian Texts (1978), p. 63; Nora Scott, "The Metternich Stela," The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 9.8:201-17 (1951) (p. 213); John Nunn, Ancient Egyptian Medicine, p. 110 (1996) Robert Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, p. 57 n. 266 (1993); Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, pp. 144-45 (1994). The text says "the child was weak beyond answering," and that he "refused the jar [of drink]." His father, Osiris, is usually the one who is considered a better candidate for resurrection, although he went directly to the underworld to preside over the judgment of the dead.

Horus certainly wasn't crucified. That falsehood probably comes from another crackpot mythicist, nineteenth century atheist, Kersey Graves, who includes him among his Sixteen Crucified Saviors(1875), none of whom were crucified! Sloppy, sloppy sloppy! Richard Carrier Graves » Internet Infidels

No record of Horus ever being called "the lamb" or "the way". "The light"? Maybe. After all, he was the sky god and was yoked with the sun god Ra as Ra-Hoor-Khuit. Heb Nekhtet, the festival of Horus, the Festival of the Sacred Falcon, or Festival of Victory, was held annually at Edfu, Egypt, at the beginning of the fifth month of the Egyptian calendar, the month of Khoiak (October/November), coinciding with the flooding of the Nile. Nekhtet is Egyptian, not Hebrew. (Oi, veh!) In other words, little of what you've told us is accurate. Careful whom you worship!

 

I used to worship the sun, but after it gave me skin cancers I realized it's not nice.

 

It's also an inanimate object.

Some of it is also insightful. Joseph Cambell made that argument in The Power of Myth. Myths, he claims, are simply metaphors which convey truths that are hard to express adequately through ordinary language. Karen Armstrong distinguishes between mythos and logos, both of which are useful in understanding reality. Logos is about the scientific understanding of reality by generating and testing testable propositions about the world around us. Mythos is about using stories to convey truths that cannot easily be put into words. For example, the Adam and Eve myth in Genesis 3 describes the prototypical situation of two people in paradise who can't get their minds off the one thing they are told they can't have: the forbidden fruit., which would give them knowledge of good and evil. To me, this makes the same point that Buddhists do in the doctrine of upadana (attachments; grasping) or taṇhā (craving). All too human, and basic to the dilemma of our existence..

 

If you think worshipping an inanimate object is weird, worshipping a person dead 2000 years or a big Orange blob living down in Florida (and I don't mean the sun!) That's really weird.

Besides the sun is incredibly animated, what you talking about? It never rests! In my worship it's alive, sharing its life force with the earth. But don't get burned or blinded by the light!

 

The sun is certainly nice, but not many of us anymore believe that it has any knowledge of us or what it is doing. And one day, it will burn out, like other stars of its kind.

That person dead 2000 years ago may be dust, but left us His teachings and example which we can draw on as inspiration for our lives. As is usually the case, a religion that's the product of biological and cultural evolution (as they all are) is kinda messy. I go to a Christian church in which we actually have two religions under one roof. One is the religion of Paul about a Sky God who created defective products (without admitting it) who fell into sin and deserve eternal punishment, but in His infinite mercy, sent his Son to die for our sins and triumphed over Sin and Death by rising from the grave and ascending to Heaven. All we have to do is believe and accept those ideas and we'll go to heaven when we die, be united with our loved ones, and spend an eternity of happiness with Jesus on the heavenly golf courses. Except that when we do we're also expected to observe certain rules of conduct (not because that will get us to Heaven, but cuz that's what saved people do). Like not allowing gays to be preachers or to be married in the church, and other rules reminiscent of the Pharisees. The other is a religion based on accounts of the teachings and example of Jesus as presented in the gospels--a radical who preached peace, love and understanding for everyone, including society's rejects. Who violated many of the 615 rules of the Jewish purity laws, healed lepers, touched corpses, hung out with sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors, and other unclean folks, in table fellowship-- something like a Rainbow Gathering we have today. His followers thought He was the promised Jewish Messiah, and He led a group of them to Jerusalem in a Grand Entrance, and got Himself nailed. In other words, He was something of a Hippie. The latter Jesus is the One we worship in the Sunday school class I attend in the same building with the folks who prefer the former, more respectable deity.

When the evangelicals are raptured and the rest of us die, I have a vision that we will all go to the great Gathering in the Sky, where we'll partake of the bounties of the Heavenly Dumpster, in the company of drug addicts; prostitutes; toothless, bathless derelicts and homeless people; and dilapidated hebephrenics. And it will be Heaven, but some Christians, including those in the Sunday School downstairs, may think they've taken a wrong turn. God is Love, and Jesus is the closet guy I know of who personified it.