Christianity is actually a story of mushrooms and astrology

For me the words insulting and demeaning come to mind more than "provacative" but to each his own.

 

Which in the past, in this forum, I have also described as "insulting and demeaning"

 

Agreed. I didn't take it personally either. I wanted to point out, I oppose any person insulting another's faith or belittleing it. And that is not directed at Dupree either who was bringing up a piece for discussion. I looked at the piece which headlines this thread. The assumptions themselves are.... beyond my capacity to comment upon.

A discussion of pharmacology and drug use definately has a place in the discussion of history. Some kind of fungus in wheat or rye may well have played a role in the French revolution. To assume it has first place seems to me to be a simplistic reading of any history or faith.

 

I didn't know Walpurgisnacht was a Pagan/Wicca festival? My maternal Grandmother was a Swede and talked about the festival when the farm animals were let back out into the pasture. She remembered it as a street fair kind of time with minimal religious overtones. Named for an English missionary saint isn't it?

That it would also have roots in an earlier "nature" festival is not surprising. Many feasts and festivals in central Europe have multiple threads of history.

 

What you say is quite true though shamanism in the Middle East is not a major part of the history of their ritualistic behavior. They were more commonly sacrificial religions. Shamanism and sacrificial priests are quite different.

I can't think of anything in Judeo-Christian-Islamic history that even suggests drug use. That doesn't seem to work for Egypt or the Mesopatamian faiths either, though there is some use of "hemp" in rituals later in history. Wine and "strong drink" (i.e.beer) were the drugs of choice in those cultures. If your authors were talking about India, China, South America, or sub-Saharan Africa, they would strike me as more credible.

Certainly the Church would be skeptical as would Islam, etc. Yet scholars work within and outside the religious faith systems all the time. For example, there is significant evidence that a major contributing factor to the spread of Islam was the presence of quasi-Christian groups who had "lost" in the Christological controversies of their day. Neither group is terribly happy with that story but major scholars continue to do the work regardless.

Likewise many Judeo-Christian scholars today suggest Abraham is not one chgracter but a compilation of herioc figures. Again not a popular position among the faithful but it gets serious study.

I perfer to think issues of faith arise out of divine revelation but even if you choose not to believe that then doesn't it make sense that they arise out of a longing to explain why things are the way they are and attempts to control nature instead of arising from folks getting high?

I don't mind the quest for truth, it will lead where it leads. I find wild generalizations by groups with their own agenda to start with (The name "gnostic" in the title suggests a strong bias to start with) to not move the truth along very much and is at the root of my objections in this thread.

 

OK, but the folks in the original post seem to see it everywhere! That is unjustifiable from any historical observation.

If that were happening within either the major faith (here for example any of the Abrahamic faiths) or within their opponents it would be mentioned either directly or indirectly within their sacred texts. An example of that would be the treatment of the use of alcohol which is challenged in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures and banned in the Koran. There is no comparable reaction to any use of hallucinagenics (sic) in any of the three's holy writ.

 

Very correct and a good example. A difference might be that while the Incas had a reason to hide things from an invader no such dynamic exists within the Abrahamic faiths. We have extra Biblical writings for both Judaism and Christianity including works by opponents and apostates. None mention drug use, likely for the reson you mentioned, lack of product.