Let's talk about the ONE TRUE religion

The Aten is the one true God.

I wouldn't mind being Zoroastrian. Makes fucking your sisters less weird.

>first monotheist religion
>believes there are two (2) gods
this is the stone-in-your-shoe of my brain

Angra Mainyu isn't a god dumb dumb

so it's just an entity that's powerfull enough to challenge a god?

It challenges mortals, Ahura Mazda already blew him the fuck out by being able to create shit

so it's like in the silmarillion? i can dig it

You are now aware that there is 0 evidence for what Zoroastrians actually believed until the Sassanid empire.

>one of the tenets of zoroastrianism is that most religions are implicitly true

KEK

Ashurism?

More or less, yes, it basically is the Silmarillion with less kin slaying

>one of the tenets of zoroastrianism is that most religions are implicitly true

Zoroastrianism is called the Good Religion because only it is True, other religions are the product of the daevas and lead to death either by suicide bombing or by letting in people that will slit your throat

>First monotheist religion.
>No proof of such ever actually offered.

My Turkish "Arab History" Professor told us Zoroastrianism is "Iranian Judaism" and is thus compatible with Christianity.

>My Turkish "Arab History" Professor
no agenda there

>Turkish
Stopped reading there

Humans, earth, animals, sky, plants, and technology. Where is your God?

Not true. We can establish what Sassanids believed and then reconstruct Proto-Indo-Iranian beliefs via commonalities with Vedic thought and artifacts from archaeological sites in Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC).

...

>I'll just assume that if I take a religious text from around the 5th century, and look for commonalities with a religious community that existed 1,000-2,500 years prior, nothing will have changed and you can just assume things like monotheism stayed constant all that time.

That's how we know that the Jews and Christians of 5th century AD were polytheists, since they have a creation myth that has much in common with Babylonian polythiest beliefs.

Thoughts?

This

How do we know this isn't just someone finding a copy of the Book of Isaiah and going off the deep end with it?

couldve just as easily been this, wow

i mean you're right that the scythians and slavs didn't and that guy is wrong, but indo-european speaking peoples throughout the roman empire absolutely ended up worshipping egyptian gods at some point.

You don't get what I am saying since you haven't studied this topic in-depth. We can rely on a lot of techniques based on artifacts, linguistics, and more to reconstruct the way Zoroastrianism developed.

Proto-Indo-Iranians of Sintashta culture came from around Transoxiana near Ural Mountains to Bactria, Northern Afghanistan. They brought their culture of fire-worshipping, chivalry, and more, but it was polytheistic. Zarathustra rebelled against this and reformed their beliefs to be more henotheistic. Then it slows spread to Western Iran in Pars region.

This is fact.

I recommend the books:

Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism, edited by Michael Stausberg. Focus on Chapter 7 by Anders Hultgard

The Abrahamic faiths are largely based off Zoroastrianism. The ideas of paradise (Avestan word pairidaēza), transcendental moral dualism, light = goodness & darkness = evil metaphors, angels (yazatas), personified evil figures (e.g., Asmodeus is based off daeva Aēšma), eschatological reward and punishment (Chinvat Bridge), Day of Judgment (Frashokereti), rigid duality between truth (asha) and lie (druj), savior of light (Saoshyant), and the resurrection of the dead (Yasna 19) descended from Zoroastrian influence. Read Chapter 7 of Michael Stausberg's Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism for the most up-to-date scholarly research regarding this topic.

>This is fact.
It's conjecture. There are ZERO texts relating to any of this that aren't 1,500 years after the fact for Zoroaster/Zarathustra. You are suggesting that we can link the spread of a material culture to the holding of very specific cosmological ideas over a period of millenia. That's retarded.

>The Abrahamic faiths are largely based off Zoroastrianism.
Yes, IF you believe that Zoroastrianism remained largely unchanged for the almost 1,500-2,000 years between what we have earliest linguistic evidence for Proto-Iranian people worshiping anything and Sassanid era Zoroastrian beliefs. Can you tell me any other religion that gets this kind of treatment? I can't think of any that gets the claims that the religious community puts out treated with such low levels of skepticism.

None of the ideas you mentioned have any proof of them being found until almost the rise of Islam, not in any sort of primary text. Anything could have happened in between a Zoroastrian reform circa 1,000 B.C. and then.

Is there no "Intro to Zoroastrianism" chart/guide?
I wish there was a local Zoroastrian temple nearby so I could see/learn first hand

>Is there no "Intro to Zoroastrianism" chart/guide?

You can read the Gathas here
zoroastrian.org/GathaSongs/index.htm

Or the The Religion of the Good Life here
b-ok.org/book/941395/2bd6c8

I'm tired of typing over and over again. Based on inscriptions, artifacts, oral tradition, texts of Greeks, and much more, we can make inferential claims.

Qumran Cave's drawings, for example, showed how Jews under Achaemenid Empire were influenced heavily by the idea of Chinvat Bridge.

There is, indeed, development to Zoroastrianism, but the symbols, mythos, and so forth have largely remained similar given their strong parallels with PII. Just read the book I mentioned.

Instead of talking out of your ass, read the book I mentioned and fuck off.

>Zarathustra and Zoroastrianism,
You mean a 125ish page long survey book?
>Based on inscriptions
Which inscriptions posit a continuity of belief between Zoroaster's time and the Sassanid era?

> oral tradition,
Notoriously unreliable and disbelieved in every other religion; oral tradition has Abrahamic monotheism starting from Day one, and that's bullshit.

>, texts of Greeks,
Which texts of greeks? Greeks barely even mention Iranian religion, and nothing about Zoroastrianism; you only get that by taking things like Hereoduts's mention of fire worship and then saying WELL IT MUST BE THE SAME!, despite that being a very large reach.

>Qumran Cave's drawings, for example, showed how Jews under Achaemenid Empire were influenced heavily by the idea of Chinvat Bridge.
I am unaware of any drawings in the Qumran caves. Considering that they are not in Persia or Babylon, and that the actual texts found in the Qumran stash are 2nd Century B.C. at the oldest, well after the Achmaenid empire was gone, I'm going to call bullshit.

>There is, indeed, development to Zoroastrianism, but the symbols, mythos, and so forth have largely remained similar given their strong parallels with PII
Are you fucking retarded? You're using the continuity of a material culture to express the continuity of an idea. Take a look at Greek Olympian worship, and how we KNOW there was significant development in worship and hero-stories, like how Herakles, you know, the guy whose name means "Glory of Hera" becomes the anatognist and punching bag of said deity instead of her high priest. But we have a continuous material culture in Greece from the Mycenean period onto the classical period, so clearly, we can use classical era mythological texts to show what dark age and former Greeks believed.

>Instead of talking out of your ass,
Pot, meet kettle.

>You mean a 125ish page long survey book?
It's also promoted by Richard Foltz, one of the best Iranologists. I think it's the best book to determine influences of Zoroastrianism, especially the chapter I referred to.

>Which inscriptions posit a continuity of belief between Zoroaster's time and the Sassanid era?
Kartir Hangirpe's, Qumran Caves, all of the in BMAC, and much more. Just read the book I reference.

>Greeks barely even mention Iranian religion
Bullshit. Even the word magic has Persian origin and Xenophon spent a long time explaining rituals of magi.

>I am unaware of any drawings in the Qumran caves.
The drawings in Qumrun Cave had drawings and scrolls describing bridge to afterlife, which largely resembled Chinvat Bridge.

The word paradise has Avestan origin too.

Read sources:
iranicaonline.org/articles/zoroastrianism-i-historical-review
Sassanian era Zoroastrianism was preserved relatively well.

Notably idea of XᵛARƎNAH came from Proto-Indo-Iranians. Just read the article linked.

All scholars agree that Zoroastrianism is far older than Judaism, the only debate is about how old it is

Some claim it dates back to -1200BC others claim -2000BC

Yeah worship Ahura Mazda (ahura, asura, makes me thonk) and demonise the Indo-European gods (Deva, Daeva, makes me thunk again) Because some guy saw a spirit on the river bank that told him to do so.
t. Zoroastrianism
Yeah nah no thankyou.

معركة القادسيّة

Why did Zoroastrians copy their symbol?

It's a homage

>with less kin slaying
>Persia and Parthia