Which discredited atheist edgelord talking point is dumber?

[If my soul was made of stone]

I always found the "Mary is actually Isis" talking point funnier than "Jesus is actually Horus", as someone who actually worships Isis. "Sorry Christoids, but the Egyptians have a monopoly on the veneration of maternal figures, and to do it yourselves is literally stealing and you should give it back!"

[If my soul was made of stone]

I always found the "Mary is actually Isis" talking point funnier than "Jesus is actually Horus", as someone who actually worships Isis. "Sorry Christoids, but the Egyptians have a monopoly on the veneration of maternal figures, and to do it yourselves is literally stealing and you should give it back!"

I mean, the Cult of Isis was part of the state religion in the imperial days in Rome.

These people curiously never have a bone to pick about that when it's done by faiths for which they don't already have an irrational animus. It would be awfully funny to hear squabbles between different pagan sects over who "stole" Inanna-Ishtar-Astarte and ought to leave her be, though.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Mormonism did rip off the King James Bible though.

No it did not. Religious canons are not "intellectual property" and religious founders, even sketchy and dishonest ones like Joseph Smith, are not Ye Olde Napster.

It seems too often that a lot of the folks who accuse the Abrahamic faiths of STEALING from antecedent faiths (that surely never included any syncretic elements themselves, right?) also just don't know what they're talking about when it comes to either. In a vague discussion on religious matters in a Discord server I'm in last week, which I tend to keep a close eye on as one of the very few people there who actually practices any religion, a user who generally does very little but post about extraordinarily esoteric contemporary leftist theory pulled out the old chestnut about St. Brigid of Kildare being STOLEN, calling the pagan Brigid "the queen Celtic goddess [sic]" as though there were ever one unified Celtic mythology, let alone one where Brigid held that specific role. I declined to comment, naturally.

I think Wicca deserves a fair bit of blame here with its core principle of all historical gods and goddesses being emanations of one of each; this isn't inherently dangerous if handled with the proper sensitivity, but the Wiccan MO has always been to act like all of the historical antecedents had the same central characteristics as the Horned God and Triple Goddess, rather than assembling a composite understanding of those deities from the various aspects of ancient figures. This, of course, is central to that faith's attempts to make it seem more ancient than it actually is, lest it be perceived as STEALING anything or fundamentally representing its origins as the semen-stained woodland fantasies of a fundamentally conservative old man. I'm one to talk, given that my own interpretation of a unified divinity is heavily syncretic and drawn on several specific predecessors, but I try to acknowledge their unique identities as emanations of the whole.

[If my soul was made of stone]

Both are silly points but the 2nd point is really egregious because any basic reading of Hitler and Nazis could tell you that Hitler had little outspoken religious beliefs and if anything they were fueled by Germanic paganism

The more esoteric elements of Nazi ideology were selectively mined from pre-Christian traditions and contemporary occultism to provide an ex post facto justification for hate and establish the ideology as a state cult. The contemporary image of Germanic/Norse paganism and esotericism is colored by this co-opting to the point that most associate those traditions with Nazism, and many who practice them espouse Neo-Nazi beliefs which they claim are mutually reinforced with their "ancestral" faith, but what we do know about the pre-Christian traditions does not suggest that any of the key secular tenets of Nazi ideology stem from it. It must be noted, however, that distortions in many early sources for information on these traditions inspired Nazi ideas: in particular Tacitus' Germania, effectively a work of hearsay used to push the author's pet narrative about Germanic tribes being "noble savages" untouched by the corruption and decadence of contemporary Roman society, was latched onto by the founders of Nazism as proof in their eyes of racial supremacy.

[If my soul was made of stone]

I always found the "Mary is actually Isis" talking point funnier than "Jesus is actually Horus", as someone who actually worships Isis. "Sorry Christoids, but the Egyptians have a monopoly on the veneration of maternal figures, and to do it yourselves is literally stealing and you should give it back!"

I always had an inkling of a suspicion that noting common tropes in religions across the world was a point in religion's favor, not against it.

As Nathan notes, this simply isn't salient to Extremely Online Zoomers who know of little else but this country's draconian IP laws, or people raised on Chick tracts who take The Two Babylons at face value. I agree, though, in the same sense that deep observation of cave art makes me far more emotional than it ought (to the extent that I'm due to get a little aurochs-shaman-guy from the Cave of the Trois-Frères ink-needled into me next month): that it's all fundamentally an expression of the human passion and our attempts to understand the world that have existed for as long as we have.