That Jesus existed and came to tell us to "give to Ceasar" and be passive to all authority.

Clearly the "bible" was a plagiarism and a tool created in Rome. Biggest lie ever. Henry the 8th is the best study for understanding how its used for control.

Abandon faith and ask questions.

Faith is why the US doesn't worry about the future. Faith kills and destroys through perpetuating passivity and waiting for "God" to fix everything.

Yet, the myth lives on.

"Your vote makes a difference." Is another good one

...only ever vote on policies (to us all) stupid!

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post5700447

i watched most of the first film (~2h), and i must say they're very reasonable.
they don't say that the moonlanding was a hoax, but that a lot of the imagery that made its way to the media is fake.
the explanations are good, and it makes a lot of sense to me.
in fact, i've been wondering that myself whenever i see perfectly lighted technicolor photographs of astronauts walking the moon...


... is considered a historical fact nowadays.
the second part of that sentence is your interpretation of the first part! i have never read that.
i think he must have been a pretty cool guy (kicking over those sale stands in the temple...), but i totally agree with what you say about institutionalised christianity.
i think it started with Paulus.

Whether or not you choose to "abandon faith and ask questions" is up to you. I don't think that the two are mutually exclusive at all. You're not "ignorant" to have faith in a deity if you choose to. Just be sure that it is your choice, not something that was imposed upon you as a kid.

The subject of "The Quest for the Historical Jesus" is particularly interesting to me. We can plainly see that Jesus' words were heavily redacted ... and that, most likely, many words ascribed to him were never spoken at all. At different sections, Jesus sounds like an Essne, a Pharisee, and a Roman ruler. One moment he is refusing to judge a harlot. Another moment he is judging an entire temple with a whip. We know that this religion became the new State Religion of Rome. And, in fact, the great majority of the text of the New Testament consists of the letters(?) of an almost-as-enigmatic figure who at one time claims to be the greatest Pharisee ... although he never speaks like one ... and at another time asserts his native-born Roman citizenship to get himself out of a tight spot. He refers to "the Scriptures," and yet many today are told that his own letters are "the Scriptures."

So, there is a lot of ambiguity here. A lot of interesting things to speculate and to talk about – if you dare.

Now, any human religion has more or less the same issues. Judaism, Confucism, Hindu, Buddhism, Shinto – none are exempt from being the work of Man. If you want to talk about and study religion, you'd better clearly understand what you are getting yourself into.

- - -
But, I think, these are not "conspiracy theory" discussions. This should continue on the F&R Mega-Thread.

It is a common ploy of con men to tell The Big Lie, and then back off to a much smaller, seemingly much more reasonable, lie but it is still a lie or at least untruth and works to undermine trust and credibility. NASA is both essentially a co9llective of scientists as well as a government agency. Scientists abhor fake but as a government agency it isn't hard to imagine that they might be amenable to cover ups. However if this were so how is it that we know of so many disasters, many of which involved loss of life, some on Live TV! One cannot succeed at anything truly new and "earth-shaking" without failures along the way. Knowing what doesn't work is part of learning what does. Only agencies that have some product to sell at a profit view fakes, lies, and cover-ups as valuable tools. It's a pretty safe bet that NASA is more honest and forthcoming than most individual people.

As for the photos you might want to consider that

1) Any sort of 'fudging" in observable data, Science, will surface and usually far faster than one can imagine... thus a very bad idea.

2) Numerous professionals, publications and investigative TV shows (like the Mythbusters - experts at film fakery and special effects) recreated conditions on the Moon and have discredited ALL alleged photo fakery.

Not only did we land on the Moon (complete with Neil's flubbed line seen and heard Live) but nobody even felt the need to fake photos. "Why would anyone doubt us, the cream of the crop of all scientists on planet Earth?" Engineers differ from Scientists in that engineers often must settle for "good enough" and given an extremely limited size and mass of payload, the cameras were simply the best that could be afforded to transport to the Moon in the late 60s. Technology development which just as easily could have, would have, uncovered any fakery instead has only served to add to the proof that it was all quite real

As Myth almost always exceeds the Man, I suspect what is meant here that while it is likely that "Jesus the man" did exist, there can be little doubt that "Jesus the Myth" is much larger than the Man. Even within the Gospels the man described is very different and many biblical scholars attribute this to the authors knowing their "flock" and tailoring the message to suit their biases. Far greater is what The State, first in the form of Constantine, did to bend the message to suit Imperial Rome by promoting passivity and promising "Pie In The Sky".

That, I think, is the juicy Conspiracy Theory referred to here regarding Jesus of Nazareth.

You want Juicy ?... You Got It!

I have long been a champion of the concept that "Truth is Stranger Than Fiction" and this seems to apply to conspiracies as well, especially when absolutely and provably real and even admitted and/or boasted about! Plus, it provides evidence for an important tenet of conspiracies. If too many people are involved it either failed or it never happened.... that and the fact that truly major, future-shaping conspiracies require major funding.

Just this week not only did the New York Times break a truly ground-shaking bit of investigative journalism but the few subordinates involved as well as the principals, Charles and David Koch, admitted it. Not only that, check this boasting brigand out!!

The co-opting of The US Democratic Process, can it get much juicier than that?!? BTW when you see most corporations including industry giants like AT&T and General Electric at odds with Truly Big Oil in shaping the policies of The Republican party, how can you define Conservative and Liberal as simply binary anymore?

Reminds me of a somewhat more upsetting one, that of Jimmy Saville. Not the stuff of spy fiction but real-life conspiracies of silence around truly horrific acts.

This one is for you 273 - one from the heart. I hope you get both justice and truth. Although I don't think it will be exactly what you expect. A friend from California recently called me. I don't know how many friends you have and I'm not going to ask. But this friend would give his life for me and I would do the same for him. I think we have known each other for more than thirty years. And our kids grew up at about the same time. Later you will ask me if I trust him. Yes I trust him without reservation. You see his son was pumping jet fuel which he has done for the last five years. And suddenly he sees a UFO. They tell him to shut his mouth or he will be fired. He is fired anyway. This is a marine base in the California desert need I point it out on a map to you. Anyway my friend tells me that UFOs are real. And it's probably not a good idea to go over the fence. I have decided that I really don't care. If I ever posted any truth there is none more than this.

Enorbet, as I referred to earlier, I refer you once more to http://www.aulis.com concerning Apollo.

The gist of the problem was that a very popular President made a technically-impossible challenge to the Nation ... then, became a martyr in November of 1963. The problem is that we could not, and still cannot, go beyond "Low Earth Orbit." We cannot venture beyond the boundaries of our planet's magnetosphere – yet!

The emanations of El Sol, when they interact with that magnetosphere, create an electrical generator – the Northern and the Southern Lights – that produces well over ten million megawatts of power. And those same forces generate a similar effect on Jupiter and Saturn. The only thing that enables us to survive here is the same thing that powers your compass. They strike the surface of the Moon full-force, creating an extremely radioactive place. We did not have protection then, and we still do not have it today. "Reality Sucks, but it is still Reality."

Rightly or wrongly, NASA made a monumental political decision to "make Kennedy's dream come true, on time." Perhaps they have regretted it ever since. I hope so.

One of the most interesting articles on Aulis is this one – http://www.aulis.com/moonbase2016.htm – where they talk frankly about "leaving Apollo's legacy behind" in hope of actually one day creating a "moon base." They are openly concerned that NASA might be reaching too far, and asking too much, and asking for lots and lots of money without sound technical justification, in "reaching for Mars" when the Moon is much closer and they haven't actually gone there. In short, this is a site that does care very deeply about the prospect of space exploration. They simply want our future directions to be truthful. It is certainly a serious possibility that "The Big Lie," although politically expedient in the 1960's, could now put future exploration, and explorers, at grievous but unnecessary risk kill them. And that is an extremely legitimate concern.

As for me, I want to see that actual Moon Base, in my lifetime. I don't want to continue seeing NASA hiding behind a Big Lie, and for this to be standing in the way of actual progress towards that goal. (Which it definitely is doing, IMHO, today.)

But the BioSphere II project in the Arizona desert showed just how wrong our theories might prove to be. No one anticipated that the iron in the soil would absorb oxygen. But it did, and in time the environment simply became uninhabitable. So, the "Biospherians" just walked out the door and left it open behind them ... having learned a great deal about what an extraterrestrial mission might one day face.

So you think it more plausible that everyone involved in the US space program and all the spies in the USSR at the time and all astronomers from all countries, friendly and not so to the US, are still keeping silent to this day than the moon landings were true?
I refer you to the video I linked to in post #13 above.

back then full on cold war, i think they had different incentives.

again, i don't buy into the idea that the moon landings themselves were fake.
but to have some real good looking imagery (and now weirdly smudged and badly lighted b/w live footage) to go around the world... come on, you know it makes sense. It Just Looks Better on TV (tm).


if you say so. :-/


ok, we agree on that.
they put the cross on the banners of their army (fighting against turks i think).

Nope! He was just fighting another imperial candidate. And I think the symbol he used was the Chi-Rho monogram, not the cross. But the real reason he adopted Christianity was probably because he needed a unifying ideology for the empire and Christianity looked like the best option for that.

The notion of Christianity as a "State Religion of Rome" has been referred to as Constantine's Triumph. But it is a curious thing: the Roman Church outlasted the Roman Empire by centuries. To this day, countries all around the world have embassies to "The Holy See.™"

- - -

With regards to Apollo, one must understand that those were much more trusting, much more innocent times. If "[URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite"Uncle Walter[/URL]" said "that's the way it was," then it was. No one at that time really understood the technical obstacles that would stand in the way of reaching that satellite which, after all, seems "not that far away." There was a sense of "Americanism" to the point of jingoism. This was what Americans wanted to think about America, and NASA gave them what they wanted. It took another ten years for Congress to become suspicious – but they allowed the program to simply be shut-down without revealing it. People today still very much do not want to believe that they were purposely duped by their own Government, and I have no doubt that, publicly at least, most people will not. They're entitled to that, of course.

But this also means that NASA really doesn't have any "street cred" when it wants to spend bezillions of bucks to "Go To Mars."

ping sundialsvcs - Sorry Bro but I can't take seriously a website that continues to argue for "theories" that were so readily debunked, some as pure fabrication like the laughable claim that Stanley Kubrick "admitted" he did it all with special effects in a film studio, as credible evidence for anything much more than human imagination and hubris. Granted some of the "evidence" takes a bit more research than the Kubrick lie to dismiss, but it has all been addressed in places far more critical, thorough, tooled, and well-funded than here and the ultimate facts of Laser reflection and the final blow of photos from orbit of the landing sites has made any ersatz interpretation of earlier data and photos not only moot but absolutely irrelevant since it not only WAS there, much of it is STILL IS!

Visit this please and don't miss the Zoomed link - --- Modern Orbiter Photos of Apollo Landing Site ---

It seems much of your deep belief is made possible by the larger "fact" regarding the Van Allan Belts which I assure you that your reporting of what you believe to be true about that phenomenon is stuck on the level of a casual reader of a newspaper or Pop Sci magazine from the 50s. It just isn't like you apparently still imagine, and though they can still offer somewhat serious obstacles at certain times, they are not constant and not a "deal breaker".

Perhaps a larger issue is your negative concern with the NASA budget. In 1965-1972 the maximum NASA ever received their funding was roughly ! 4 % ! of the National Budget. Since 1993 it has been LESS THAN 1 PERCENT! or as a decimal .001of Federal Spending. What baffles me is how nobody, not journalists, not policy makers, not corporations, not economists and financiers, let alone the common masses bothers to recall what a "shot in the arm" on so many levels the Space Program was.

After so much time it is extremely difficult to gather up all the advances we take for granted but a few major ones in electronics, computing, solar energy, textiles, fasteners, medicine and health do stand out. We would not be having this conversation without NASA since PCs may not have been invented if at all until decades later, and many of our relatives, or even us ourselves, would have had very different jobs IF we were in fact still alive. Sports Medicine as we know it didn't result from Sports but rather from the Astronaut program.

So in that sense, even if it was possible that Apollo was a fake (and it isn't) it STILL had possibly the greatest return on investment of any human endeavor ever in all of Human history.

And it's what the USSR wanted back then too, is it? The Soviets, at the time, had their own space program and the ability to track spacecraft leaving the atmosphere and listen to their transmissions. Why did they want to leave the world convinced that the USA had beaten them?
Why have the Japanese, more recently, released images which show what looks a lot like the Apollo landing site?