Does any body know anything about Zoroastrianism?

Does any body know anything about Zoroastrianism?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

I know some. It's a religion from ancient Persian.

The important thing to remember is that when seeking information about any religion, always try deriving it from someone who belongs to that religion, and has for a significant amount of time (so they know their way around the doctrine). Usually (but not always), people who do not belong to a particular religion give invalid or inaccurate information (most likely derived from authorities of their own faith), and people who claim to have once been a part of it are the ones who usually spread the worst rumors and talk the most trash about it.

If I don't get my information directly from someone who's a part of the religion, I get it from a well researched, non biased source. I prefer this one: http://www.religioustolerance.org/

Here is their page on Zoroastrianism: http://www.religioustolerance.org/zoroastr.htm

Originated in Persia. Don't think you can covert - have to be born into it. It's dying out because of this. Freddie Mercury was a Zoroastrian.

Some, he supposedly was the guy who started the whole one God thing, Aryan priest who had a vision of one of his Gods who he felt was the ?good? God of peace and all. There was a lot of war during his lifetime and he was looking for a reason for it through his beliefs, so he came up with a ?holy? war. I may not be remembering it all right, but here you go.

The Zoroastrian Avesta

According to tradition the Zoroastrian founder Zarathustra's life changed when the god Ahuramazda granted him a vision. A spirit named Good Thought appeared and ordered Zarathustra to oppose the bloody sacrifices of the traditional Iranian cults and to give aid to the poor.

Zarathustra started to preach that there was a supreme god, the 'wise lord' Ahuramazda, who had created the world, mankind and all good things in it through his holy spirit, Spenta Mainyu. The rest of the universe was created by six other spirits, the Amesha Spentas ('holy immortals'). However, the order of this sevenfold creation was threatened by The Lie; good and evil spirits were fighting and mankind had to support the good spirits in order to speed up the inevitable victory of the good.

The Avesta often resembles a prayer book and in addition to hymns written to the god Ahuramazda contains a section of hymns written to lesser gods called the Yasts. The fourth division comprises brief prayers, like the five Nyaishes to the Sun, Moon, Water, Fire and Mithra the sun god.

A Zoroastrian high priest named Tansar established the canon of Avestan texts during the reign of the Sassanid king Khusrau II (591-628). Only about a quarter of the Great Avesta of the sixth century remains today. There is a summary, which is called the Denkard from which large parts of the Great Avesta can hypothetically be reconstructed. However many European scholars consider them of little use beyond being an aid for the study of medieval Zorastrianism. As a religion with practitioners, Zorastrianism itself is almost extinct today.

While there are similarities between other ancient religious books and the Bible they flow along the predictable lines of distortion that happens during the party game of telephone where one person whispers a message into the ear of the person next to him and so on down a line of participants. At the end of the process everyone gets a big laugh when they compare what the last person relates hearing compared to the original message that was used to start the game.