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Osiris is Bae btw.
Great, anonymous meme dude! Because I love Osiris!
Dude was badass, seriously. He was a god of life who was betrayed and murdered, torn into over a dozen pieces and had his corpse scattered. Isis, his sister-wife and a badass in her own right (a goddess of life, motherhood, magic, and taking incredibly sick and twisted revenge on anyone who pissed her off) collected the pieces, put them back together, and slept with him/his corpse to conceive their son Horus, who would go on to continue the family badass tradition. Osiris then moved to the realm of the dead, where he became one of the--by the end of the New Kingdom, simply THE--big judge everyone had to impress. Wise, impartial, and impossible to trick. After your heart was weighed against the feather of truth, it was Osiris hisownself that you were finally escorted in to see. Depicted in mummy wrappings, but with the green coloring of healthy plantlife and renewal, Osiris was a god of life and death in one.
TL;DR I don't believe in Osiris, but I think he's really cool and am not about to throw stones at people who would choose to worship him today. Modern Kemeticists are a thing, after all, and there's worse dudes to burn offerings to. So, We Fucking Love Atheism, it's so nice to see that you feel that way about my God.
The
Divine Comedy doesn't really count as doctrine, but the idea of a
Limbo of the Patriarchs or the
Harrowing of Hell has always been present in Christian thought, differing slightly depending on the denomination.
The idea of a Messiah is also a key part of Jewish thought as found in the Old Testament. So yes, they did know that someone like Jesus would exist.
What Hat said. The Divine Comedy sort of distilled a lot of ideas that were floating around in the cultural background, so don't take Dante as doctrine, but Catholicism at the very least has the idea of limbo and the various church fathers have been fighting about it for two thousand years. From a lifetime of talk with other Catholics, as far as I can tell the general view is that the God who supposedly sent his son to save us because he loved us wouldn't will eternal torment on those who were unlucky enough to be born before Jesus hit the stage. Even if he used to think that way, a lot of shit got changed once we hit New Testament times.
