claim god sent his son to die, was raised etc etc?

tried google but every link comes up with christianity pages

I don't know about the 'son' qualifier, but plenty of gods have died and been resurrected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_g...ebirth_deities

im having a debate with someone right now and they said

"The one thing that seperates God from any other "god" is that He sent His son to die, and then was raised again. allah, buddah, mohammed... none of them can say that. They are all dead and buried. Christianity is the only "religion" where their God came to Earth as a human, and died and rose for all of mankind. "

i corrected her about mohammed and buddah as being gods. ::facepalm.jpg::

i was just curious if any other god had sent their sons to earth

Ah, here you go: http://www.infidels.org/library/hist...16/chap16.html

Krishna/Chrishna seem to fit the bill best.

Did you notice this at the top?

Emphasis mine.

LOL Nope. That disclaimer should flash or something.

Hinduism has Avatars. Not all words translate over very directly but that is basically God on Earth for a little while then he dies/leaves. God concept is quite a bit different in Hinduism and it's probably not accurate to say it's "God's Son" coming to Earth and dying but there are similarities without trying to write a book here.

I don't get it. Is this supposed to be some kind of support for the truth of Christianity? If so, it's quite silly.

The one thing that separates Buddha from any other "savior" is that he attained Enlightenment by following the Eightfold Path. Jesus, Muhammad, Moses... none of them can say that. They all just worshiped some weird sky god out in the desert. Buddhism is the only "religion" where an ordinary man showed everyone how to achieve Nirvana.

Hopefully this will convince your friend to convert to Buddhism immediately.

I know it's an insanely weak argument. Basically we got to the point where she said I'm a believer and nothing you say can change that. She is unwilling to examine anything outside of her belief so it is probably a useless debate

Maybe a better tack would be looking into various other impressive miraculous claims of other religions? I'm sure there's plenty that can sound more impressive in a lot of ways, if we're starting from the "if these were all true" standpoint.

Her argument at the moment strikes me a lot like humans trying to argue they're the most specialist evar just because they happen to be the smartest of the animals, ignoring the fact that they're slower, weaker, with worse eyesight/hearing/sense of smell, can't fly, can't breath underwater, ect ect, never mind how slim that margin of "smarterness" really is.

And yes, like others have said, coming back to life isn't a new idea and was borrowed from older myths.

If it is supposed to stand as evidence for Christianity, I agree. However, it does stand as an argument against "all religions are the essentially the same" (which is clearly false, but some people use it anyway) and it actually stands -- though not on its own -- for an argument of the particular distinctiveness of Christianity compared to other religions.

There are *many* arguments which claim that Christianity was copied from somewhere else, and I have yet to see a successful one. The most notable failures are the Zeitgeist claims, but there's probably an entire class of false claims of that type (see asdfadsf32's link and one of AlterEgo's trinity links that basically says "Look! Three things!") which basically try (and fail) to make that argument.

This statement can only be true through incredibly dishonest parsing.

ELEMENTS of Christianity were CLEARLY "copied", in the sense of being "borrowed and incorporated", from other religions. And nobody, to my knowledge, claims that the entire religion was copied from A to Z from another religion (especially since a lot of what we now call "Christianity" was added well AFTER Jesus' death anyway).

Yup... this is pretty much what those arguments sound like.