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To: FredZarguna

Not Zoroaster but a pre-zoroastrian pagan deity (sun-god) Mithra who was believed to be born of a virgin. Often people, non-zoroastrians, confuse the two & think they’re the same. The story about Mithra is mythology & lore. I’m yet to meet a practicing zoroastrian who thinks zoroaster was born to a virgin.


170 posted on 06/22/2015 1:08:07 PM PDT by odds
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To: odds
But according to later tradition, Zoroaster's mother, Dughdova, was a virgin when she conceived Zoroaster by a shaft of light. [Egyptian mythology, Lorenz, London, 2000]

Mithra is kind of a problem, because he enters Zoroastrianism later and as an ahura, so as far as Zoroastrianism is concerned, Mithra's "predating" may be chronologically true in another tradition, but it is logically dubious. I certainly was not confusing the two. I'm not aware that in the Indric tradition he was anything but a god ... not born of a virgin. The Greek and Roman variations, which most people mean when they refer to Mithraism were all over the place.

None of this matters to my original point. Human mythology is full of these stories. You can take the position that C.S. Lewis did: that God inspired these ideas all over the ancient world in order to "prep the landing zone" for Jesus Christ, or that, created in His Image we intuitively would anticipate such a thing in the collective unconscious, or that Christians simply expropriated these elements from existing traditions.

Whatever the case, there is nothing blasphemous about Lucas putting this story element from the common religious tradition of mankind in Star Wars. He doesn't claim, for example, that after three days Darth Vader rose from the dead in fulfillment of the scriptures. J.J. Abrams might. But we shall see...

171 posted on 06/22/2015 1:39:01 PM PDT by FredZarguna (Let's call it what it is: Climate Immorality. Now say a Dozen Hail Marys and six Our Fathers.)
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