Today
Today is Good Friday and Friday the 13th. Someone at work said that those should cancel out to make this just a plain old Friday.
Yesterday I bought a very old copy of The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors: Or, Christianity Before Christ (which you can read on-line). It seems that Kersey Graves is doing one of these "extremely excitable 19th century authors getting carried away" things, but the book is interesting. It pretty much accuses Christianity of plagiarizing a number of other earlier religions, and seems to argue on this basis against what Thomas Paine called "fabulous theology" and against Christian religious tradition. (Did I mention that I was reading Paine's The Age of Reason the other day?)
I think that Graves ends up at a non-religious position, very much unlike Paine, who famously said that "I believe in one God, and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life" (but that revealed religions were all "fabulous", which is to say false). But I haven't finished Sixteen Crucified Saviors to know for sure.
The trouble is that Graves can't back up some of his strong claims -- so the Internet Infidels edition I linked to above says that "readers should be extremely cautious in trusting anything in this book".
