I recently watched Bill Maher's docu-propaganda “Religulous” and while there are so many unbelievably trite biasing stereotypes in that film (I found myself mentally defending other religions against some of his over-the-top generalizations) that I couldn't begin nor do I want to address them. There were a few that I feel I would like to “set the record” straight with regard to.
The short list of “stuff I would like to address” would be (1) the parallel that he draws between the story of Jesus and the story of the Egyptian god Horus written nearly 600 years before Jesus shows up on the scene, and (2) his assertion that humanity is doomed if reasonable agnostics don't take a stand and say that religion needs to be done away with once and for all. I will address the second, first.
Religion blindly holds us in the past and if we don't give it up we are doomed.
Statements like this (not that exact one. This is a reasonable summary of his film's end-statement) are damning and conclusive. They are also partly true which makes them dangerous if we allow it to stereotype reality into an unreasonable conclusion.
I just had this discussion with a co-worker recently. It went something like this: The Jewish population broke new ground in culture with Abraham and Moses. You see, up until that moment in the cradle of civilization Egyptian-style world religions were busy reliving a pattern-cyclical view of life. Said another way, from calendars to religious holidays the world was stuck in an infinite loop of staring at the past, doomed by a lifestyle to repeat it or risk not appeasing the gods they served. There was truly nothing new under the sun and they preferred it that way as demanded by their cultic priests. Society wouldn't have it another way. Then along comes this nomadic tribe following after a God demanding that the old patterns be damned requiring them to break free of the bondage of thinking like the cultures around them.
With the Jews the proverbial circle was broken. God was off and running in a straight line beckoning these tribesmen to follow off into places they would never have ventured on their own. Being stuck blindly in the past a slave to a doomed unconscionable pattern was not the form or function of this relationship. Having said that ground rules were in fact laid down for the purpose of rebooting an entire group, breaking their ties to that compulsive culture from which they emerged. It doesn't honestly get any more cutting edge than that in that specific context.
The truth is that we continue to need the lessons taught to that tribe. We need to remember our past so we can remind ourselves of where we've been in hopes to affect where we are going and not for the purpose of repeating it. We need to remember how to relate to God. We need to employ a basic and reasonably responsible manner of relating to one another that is not selfish and that defies the more base-learned behaviors of a broken culture that surrounds us. Up until that point in history the world hadn't seen a view of God in relationship to man that moved in such a direction. We simply take that relationship for granted today (some of us are worse off than others in this area.)
Bill Maher evokes doom by shocking us with intense music and images of nuclear blasts and he describes the waring of religions around the world, as they blindly worship. What we, as the viewer might neglect to realize as we watch the movie, is that Bill is the wizard behind the curtain. He is the one who is deciding what images to splash in front of you, selectively leaving other images out completely. For example, even if every war that could ever be blamed on religion had never happened, the world would in fact not be war-free. Blaming all war and destruction on religion is completely ludicrous and anyone who might be willing to reflect on the last 100 years of world history can point to plenty of good and bad examples for why people get into intense conflict, many of which have no obvious correlation to religion. His stereotype is hugely revealing at this point to the degree that it derails any semblance of reality nor could he be accused of being reasoning or reasonable (the very thing that he claims to defend throughout the movie.)
Bill draws a parallel between the story of Jesus and the story of the Egyptian god Horus written nearly 600 years before Jesus shows up on the scene, claiming that the Jesus story is just a cheap alternative to a fairly well known (at that time) religious story.
The accusation goes something like this: 600 years before Jesus shows up the Egyptians write about Horus who...
Was born of a virgin.
Who was a god.
Who healed people.
Who walked on water.
Raises someone (like Lazarus) from the dead.
Who was born on the 25th of December.
Who had 12 disciples.
Was confronted in the wilderness.
Was crucified and resurrected.
This is, at the minimum, unsettling, and Bill Maher is fairly rock solid on declaring that these are documented realities of that story. Clearly ignorant Christians are just not familiar with the fact that their religion was simply the retelling of an old mythological fairytale and are just dead wrong and their outspoken confidence in Jesus is sadly misguided...
or (as you may have guessed) Bill Maher just has it all wrong. Let's walk through these claims:
Was Horus born of a virgin?
There are multiple birth stories for Horus and absolutely none of them make his mother out to be a virgin. Anyone telling you otherwise is just making up facts. Horus mother was married to a god who was killed. As the mythology goes, she had him raised from the dead and which point she got pregnant from him so her child, Horus, could avenge his fathers death. The Egyptian gods and people in those stories were constantly having sex so there is no chance she, married to a Egyptian god, wasn't getting it on, nor does it imply that she was not having sex with the god to whom she was married.
Was Horus a god?
He eventually becomes one of a huge cast of Egyptian gods. In that sense one could argue that since Christians say Jesus was God that Horus and Jesus were similar stories. If that were the matching criteria, then Jesus story would be likenable to any of the stories of the Greek or Egyptian gods a weak association at best.
Could Horus heal people?
There is no such story. In Egypt there were these plaques that were used to evoke the name of an Egyptian god for all sorts of purposes, including healing. But there are no stories where Horus did in fact heal anyone. Bill has to make a fairly big jump to liken the stories of Jesus healing people with the Egyptian evoking plaques. My best guess would be that Bill is just regurgitating something someone told him and I would be giving him more credit than he is due in assuming he even knows about the evoking plaques.
Did Horus walk on water?
There is no story of Horus walking on water. Where does this stuff come from? It is interesting that people are willing to retell such thing and not point to a reference of such a thing. Christians can easily point to scripture that at least documents such a story about Jesus. Not so with Horus.
Did Horus raise someone from the dead the way Jesus raised Lazarus?
The fairytale Bill tells is this... Horus raises a character named Osiris from the dead and Osiris translated from Egyptian to Greek becomes Lazarus, so the Lazarus story is simply a rip-off! What Bill doesn't mention (or doesn't know) is that according to mythology Osiris is the dead father of Horus and Horus life goal is to avenge his fathers death, which he does. There is absolutely no story where Horus raises Osiris or anyone else from the dead.
Horus was born on the 25th of December, so Jesus birthday is a fabrication and parallel of Horus birth story!
Horus wasn't nor was it ever written that he was born on December 25th. He was written to have been born in the Winter Solstice which would have been October to November, and paralleled him to many other Egyptian gods and mythological figures.
The truth is that Jesus wasn't likely born on December 25th. There was a period of church history where the church was working hard at redeeming the calendar and would take goofy local or regional holidays and turn them into Christian celebrations. Unfortunately December 25th is one of those holidays. From what we know of history, the “nativity” was moved to December 25th around 350 A.D. So while we really don't know when Jesus was born, we do in fact know it wasn't December 25th which makes the likelihood of a parallel in the original story completely ridiculous.
The Jesus story stole the idea of 12 disciples from Horus who also had 12 disciples!
If Horus had any following, then the only record was of four lower-gods and some human followers (total head counts are not consistent but are guessed to be around 16 with lots of other soldiers who went to war along side Horus.) Nowhere is there any mention of 12 disciples associated with Horus. I even read about how the zodiac constellations were like his disciples based on his relationship to them, but it's a ridiculous stretch to imagine a parallel.
Horus was tempted in the wilderness and so Jesus wilderness temptation story is a rip-off?
This is the worst parallel of those I have researched so far. Jesus temptation in the wilderness follows a 40 day fast and is documented in Matthew 4 if you want to read it. Jesus is tempted to take an easy road and calmly remains steadfast in his resolve to do his sacrificial mission on earth.
Horus does a bit of fighting in his mythology and there is a story that is depicted as the wilderness parallel, but it is nothing like the Jesus temptation. The Horus story includes castration and competition for power via proving sexual domination over the other. It is so completely far fetched to imagine these two stories as any sort of parallel (I am really cleaning it up here: the real story is vulgar and more like two guys trying to prove their dominance by having evidence that they raped each other.) It seems the only parallel is the idea of simply being in the presence of a contentious individual and that is such a weak likening factor.
Horus was crucified and resurrected and is the savior of the world, making this the most convicting parallel levied against the Jesus story!
The idea that the Horus mythology contains all three of those facts is really trouble for the Jesus story. If Horus' story contains him being crucified, later being resurrected and perceived as the savior of the world, Christians have a real problem!
But... alas... they do not. None of that is in the Horus story. In fact, in Horus mythology, he does not die... at all. Which invalidates both the crucifixion as well as the resurrection claims about Horus. And the Horus story is not a story about saving anyone. It is about revenge.
So why does Bill Maher share this stuff if it is clearly all wrong?
Because he is the very thing that he claims he is rising up in “reason” against. He is a blind “believer” in an anti-religion, ill-informed and equally as confident and evangelical on behalf of his anti-gospel called “doubt.” And I don't have a problem with doubt, as long as someone is really searching for truth. And Bill claims this is who he is. But as you can see here, a few spare hours and a willingness to do some research can pull up more truth than the rantings of someone with deep pockets and a public persona like Bill Maher with an ill-informed agenda.
If you watched the movie and walked away absorbing his facts and doubts, just know that if one guy like me can take a couple hours and find a slew of failed facts and faulty logic, you might want to use the very brain that Bill Maher was so arrogantly worshiping and consider not investing trust in people like Bill who have the budget to market ideas but that don't really care enough to reasonably separate the facts from blind-anti-faith opinions that don't hold up under the scrutiny of a web designer / developer.
Final note:
I would expect the possible response to this might be “Well, Bill was misinformed about Horus, but there are many documented examples of how Christianity as a religion borrowed from Mithras mythology,” and those folks are wrong too. Here are some of those stories (as shared in Religulous):
Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25th as witnessed by Shepherds: Mithras was hewn from a rock (again in the Winter Solstice) and the early accounts say that happened before man was created. 100 years after the documenting of the Christian gospels, the Mithras mythology contained additional new story elements where shepherds helped Mithras emerge from rock where he was hewn.
Mithras was a teacher: There isn't a single story of Mithras walking around giving teachings or sermons.
Mithras had 12 disciples: Same as Horus, no 12 disciples. Again well after Jesus, people added an associated connection between Mithras and the zodiac's 12 signs (it was documented later than the time of Jesus.)
Mithras, the leader offering eternal life through shed blood: Nearly all gods talk about continuing life, but in the Mithras story the mention of blood isn't his own, but the blood shed because he killed something and nobody got eternal life via his killing. Not even close to the Jesus story really.
Mithras does miracles: All gods in all stories do god-like stuff, else why would they be gods? This isn't a silver bullet, but rather just part and parcel with god stories. The Bible itself contains stories of people worshiping false gods who claim to do miracles and the Biblical characters teaching those followers various lessons about their false gods.
Mithras is buried in a tomb, and after three days, rises: No such story. Far later in the tradition and new documentation and discussion of Mithras (after the time of Jesus) Mithras was said to travel souls to heaven or hell and some commentary imagine that ascending from hell might evoke images of resurrection, but those commentaries do not imply any comparison to the Jesus story, and even if it did, that commentary shows up after Jesus and not before. There is no tomb, or any 3 days. All of this is just extra-added silliness.
The most damning evidence against the whole idea that Christianity's Jesus is a copy of Mithras has everything to do with mistaken identity.
History tells us that the Persians told stories of a god named Mithras before Jesus showed up on the scene. But those stories, while predating the days of Jesus, are different from the Mithras religion that formed in Rome and became popular after Jesus. All of the stories that make Mithras like Jesus happened after Jesus, not in the Persian version of Mithras that predates Jesus.
So, Sorry Bill Maher... wrong again.
