# How did Christianity get hijacked by bozos?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-christianity-get-hijacked-by-bozos/473774>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [November 21, 2008, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-christianity-get-hijacked-by-bozos/473774 "2008-11-21T03:06:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 6

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**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\
**Post date:** [November 27, 2008, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-christianity-get-hijacked-by-bozos/473774/101 "2008-11-27T01:28:00Z")

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> [@coffeecat](#):
>
> Literature professors do just that, albeit with Shakespeare rather than Star Trek, and usually agree with each other on the basics.

Very vague basics, from what I’ve seen (and I was a literature major 😉 )

But my main point was that most people aren’t professors and they don’t approach things logically nor critically.

If you compare most people’s religious beliefs to what theologians say, they almost entirely don’t match. Almost all theologians believe that the Old Testament is written to teach moral lessons through story, not to display actual history. The (former) Pope endorsed Darwinian evolution. But the mass of followers don’t approach the book from a reasoned and learned standpoint, they are generally too lazy and/or stupid to read through the whole Bible, and most of everything they do know is secondhand.

For instance, most people know that there’s The Devil and that he was an angel who led a war against God and was thrown down into the pit of Hell to rule it. But in fact none of that is Christianity. That’s a story called Paradise Lost that’s based on echoes of pagan gods like Dionysus and the Gnostic Demiurge (which again probably comes from Ahriman of Zoroastrianism.)

So I mean not only are people stupid and lazy, they’ve _been_ stupid and lazy for millenia, making modern day Christianity just the end of one long game of [telephone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers). The existence of the source material, the Bible, is largely irrelevant.

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**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\
**Post date:** [November 27, 2008, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-christianity-get-hijacked-by-bozos/473774/102 "2008-11-27T01:45:10Z")

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> [@Guinastasia](#):
>
> Actually, I think Reagan was pretty much a figurehead-keep in mind, by the end of his first term, he was already showing the first signs of Alzheimers. I don’t want to say he was stupid, more like willfully ignorant.
> 
> I don’t think he was running the show. (His people, however, were a bunch of dicks, I’ll definitely agree with you there.)

Forget what I said-Reagan was a moron-he wasn’t nearly smart enough to come up with Iran-Contra.  
Now, enough hijacking. I know I say this every thread, but **Der Trihs** , what about people like Oscar Romero, or [Msgr. Hugh O’Flaherty](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_O%27Flaherty)?

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