Talk:Dying-and-rising god/Archive 2

Christian Apologists at Work
Trying to intertwine these deities with James Frazer, as if they aren't real without him, is like trying to say evolution depends on Darwin. It is a weak rhetorical strategy because all either of these men did was identify (not invent) what was already there. The fact that Persephone and company were in fact believed to die AND rise exists independent of whether any particular scholar is in fashion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:8C3:4001:9220:1943:91CD:9DBB:3756 (talk) 16:29, 11 May 2022 (UTC) Whoever put this page together is overtly trying to obscure knowledge rather than enrich it.


 * No one is arguing that these deities' existence depends on Frazer. The debate among scholars is about whether it's useful to categorize deities in this way. The idea that all these deities fit a single pattern may distort our understanding of the individual deities in question. For example, Frazer assumed that the dying-and-rising deities originated as representations of agricultural fertility. Yet even in the case of Osiris, who does check most of the boxes for a dying-and-rising deity, that assumption fails. The earliest evidence about Osiris indicates that he was originally a funerary god, and his connection with agricultural fertility, though certainly an important aspect of his character, was a secondary development (as J. Gwyn Griffiths argued at length in The Origins of Osiris and His Cult decades ago).
 * Jonathan Z. Smith, one of the most prominent critics of the category, argues that the idea of a single category for all these deities is based on Christianity. According to Smith, the deities Frazer put in the category either die without returning to the world of the living (like Osiris) or disappear and return without actually dying (like, in Smith's interpretation of the fragmentary and ambiguous texts, Baal/Hadad). In the ancient world, the argument goes, the only deity said to have died, been resurrected, and reappeared in the world of the living was Jesus. And such criticisms don't need to come from a Christian apologetic perspective. As this article says, Marcel Detienne criticized the category for "making Christianity the standard by which all religion is judged, since death and resurrection are more central to Christianity than many other faiths". A. Parrot (talk) 17:54, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Is the popular culture section necessary?
There are only two short references mentioned, both fairly niche, they don't really seem to add any value to the article. 195.226.14.2 (talk) 23:01, 12 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Yes. They are both direct examples of the topic of the article, and the topic of the article is a major part of both works.
 * Both Homestuck and Ace Combat are highly notable, with enormous amounts of culture surrounding them - music (including by professional orchestras), large quantities of fan works, numerous published articles about them, and extensive documentation on Wikipedia.
 * Just because they are modern stories in modern formats does not make them less important.
 * "Popular culture" means exactly that, culture that is currently popular. Everything cultural was "popular culture" at one point.
 * This is a significant article and could use some restructuring to have greater breadth. Something that could be cut down is the section on scholarly criticism, which is way too long and detailed for Wikipedia. LesbianTiamat (talk) 23:56, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

Self published citation
"Since the 1990s, Smith's scholarly rejection of the category has been widely embraced by Christian apologists wishing to defend the historicity of Jesus, while scholarly defenses of the concept (or its applicability to mystery religion) have been embraced by the new atheism movement wishing to argue the Christ myth theory"

The citation goes to https://www.amazon.com/This-Sun-Zeitgeist-Religion-Comparative/dp/110533967X

The author of this work seems to be a nobody who writes self published Christian apologetics. I'm not going to buy the book to check the source, but it's also unlikely that a Christian apologist would imply that apologists hang their hat on Smith while Christ Myth theorists appeal to "scholarly" works. This sentence seems to be editorializing Smith's work by giving an example of an apologist who cites him, but it's passing itself off as though it were a more comprehensive scholarly review of an article's impact. 65.128.172.37 (talk) 16:36, 3 April 2023 (UTC)


 * I've removed that text. I have no doubt that it's true—just look at the archives of this talk page, and you'll see examples of defenders and opponents of Christianity citing the scholarly works that seem to support their positions. But you're right that it needs a better source. My perennial lament is that scholars rarely address how their works are misused by laymen for polemical arguments, so Wikipedia can rarely outright say that such things happen even though they obviously do. If a better source is found, this text, or something similar, can be restored. A. Parrot (talk) 06:57, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Hahahaha omg thank you for pointing this out. I fully support scouring the citations of this article overall for further devious influence, though I have not the time or particular knowledge on this subject to do so. LesbianTiamat (talk) 03:03, 16 January 2024 (UTC)