check out this song, it's on the same subject:
http://www.suburbansprawlmusic.com/Audio/MP3/xmas05/17%20Chris%20Hatfield%20-%20Born%20Again%20Pagan.mp3

Except for the fact that most of these claims about Mithras are unsubstantiated, and can be sourced only back to the writings of a couple of people...debunked by the larger Mithraic community themselves.

Regardless of what you think about Christianity, this is a bit "convenient"...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithras#Mithraism_and_Christianity

Quoting wikipedia, the perfect and ultimate source of information. Expected though.

QI: Quite Interesting is my current obsession! Stephen Fry is just awesome! Bill Marr also shows some other examples of religious beings that have suspiciously similar stories to the birth of Jesus

QI: Quite Interesting is my current obsession! Stephen Fry is just awesome! Bill Marr also shows some other examples of religious beings that have suspiciously similar stories to the birth of Jesus

E.T. Cook is right. This has been quite well debunked for a while.

Quite awhile. By Mithrians and Christians alike. Only atheists seem to want to believe it, for some reason.

Yeah, I find some of the claims to be a bit far-fetched. My understanding is that the whole 'virgin birth' thing was a mistranslation where 'born of a virgin' should have been 'born of a young woman'. So it's a bit suspicious that Mithras would have this as part of his mythology as well.

"Only atheists seem to want to believe it, for some reason."

It does make for a convenient catch-all for disproving Christianity, though the truth is probably that the various parts are borrowed from several different religions.

Why would anyone want to disprove Christianity? The idea of some guy being born out of a virgin, walking on water and raising people from the dead seems completely plausible to me.

"...seems completely plausible to me."

So does the explosion of all of existence out of a tiny little ball of energy that a.) always existed or b.) popped into existence from nothingness. Eventually, tiny bits of matter formed, stood up, and started arguing about sexist ads in a universe extremely hostile to life.

I tend to accept that picture. Still, any way you want to cut it, the world is an insane place. Pointing out that people have to bend over backwards to make sense of it is hardly insightful, as far as I can tell.

Actually ET and wikipedia is right. I'm all for examining belief systems but facts are facts... The Mithras info given on the video is wrong. There are plenty of factual sources by which to challenge legitimacy of the Christian faith. We don't need to make up stuff like the Mithras-link conspiracy.

It is no secret that religions such as Christianity are largely based on other earlier pagan religions for some part, at least. And Christianity of course took over the old pagan habits and turned them into Christian traditions. I do not see how this disproves Christianity or God in any way. This video of course seems rather false to me since this type of info usually just does not pop up in a talk show without it being a well-known and historically documented fact.

And let us not forget that the real thing with Christianity is that it is the core of the western civilisation. There is no western world without Christianity.

Nobody pointed out that Christmas is not in fact the day when Jesus is born but just claimed to be, so Christianity could use a popular pagan festive in the name of... wait for it - Christianity.
If there was a person called Jesus, he/she was born somehwere in March, April, according to the Bible.

Anyway, Christianity is hand-made religion... just like all other religions, unless someone prefers to believe that the Bible and all other books like it were downloaded by the heaven fax machine. It is completely normal to have pieces from all other reliigons, especially when there were no copyright to help and sort that out. :)

Happy Hollidays.

I'm friends with several ministers in the Presbyterian Church-USA (as distinct from the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA), and I am a member of the PCUSA myself. None of us are as clueless to the similarities between early Christian mythology and its contemporary mystery cults. It's obvious that nothing appears without showing influences of its cultural and historical context, and the notion that this aspect of Christianity should be somehow devastating to the faith is laughable at best.

The only people for whom this will be problematic are those who think that a person's relationship to religious faith and belief is necessarily predicated upon material support for said beliefs. Christians whose beliefs require material support are among the most easily disregarded by atheists, but, unfortunately, the fact that many critics of religion stop with the easiest targets doesn't say much in favor of their intellectual rigor.

Which is to say: the world's a complicated and strange place! Easy refutations rarely address real problems.

Are you serious posting this shit? Not every Christian community even celebrates Christmas on the 25th! I read in TRS in 1992 at a red brick, in a department where philological source criticism was taken seriously, and Keith Eliot, who wrote "Questioning Christian Origins", was lecturer, and so it's not as if debunking Christianity was a forbidden sport. The fact the NT uses titles for Jesus borrowed from contemporary mythologies is old news, as is the fact the Roman Church appropriated elements from civic religions. But the idea that Mithras is somehow Jesus the prequel is total TOTAL bollocks!

Stephen Fry is Britain's leading pseudo-intellectual. Because he's terribly popular, has 10 zillion followers on Twitter, and mentioned Bishop Berkley on the Kumars at Number 42, it's somehow assumed he's is Dr Johnson. If he is such a genius, how come they reject his script for Doctor Who, ffs? How come he 'thoughtlessly' labelled all Poles Nazi collaborators? This is the man who dismissed a huge swathe of English poetry as "ars dribble", cause somebody at Cambridge wedgied him with a prosody text book?

Please! I thought this site was a meant to be reflexive in respect of its cultural sources.

1. It's spelled "arse."

2. I'm from the Bible Belt. (Which doesn't have a bearing on anything.)

3. Great show!

Warmest regards,
Mytch P.

Whos the bald guy? I have seen shorts of his comedy on youtube and it was HILARIOUS, but I have no clue what his name was.

And true or not, these same comparisons between Mithras and Jesus were taught to me in a religion class by a religious teacher, just to get us thinking. We also looked at similarities in creation myths.

Oh, and if they found Jesus' bones, you'd better believe there would be some rioting, regardless what the above commenters have to say. "Oh, my faith is more than just beliefs in some things that can be disproven!" You just keep telling yourself that, sweetums. ;)

So if current rules had been in effect, the New Testament would have to have been withdrawn as plagiarism.