Christianity

[Belinda]

Have you ever visited a penal institution...minimum, medium or maximum security? You'll find that it's positively filled with people who "introspect and find integrity" in themselves. They''ll tell you, "I'm a good guy, really; I don't belong in here." Even the most honest will only say, "I made a mistake...one mistake...but really, I'm a good person."

So much for the "introspection" and judgment of human beings. Whenever we judge ourselves, we always put our fingers down firmly on our own side of the scales. We're always "good enough" to satisfy "The Judicial Court of Me."

Compare ourselves to the righteousness of God, and we know where we really are. But almost nobody does that.

If the criminal, however revolting his crimes, finds that core respect for his own integrity then he has it and it saves him from despair.

His problem is not his self image. We all have lots of that. It's that he doesn't accept responsibility for anything the's done. His evaluation of the importance of all his "good" deeds is high, and his evalution of the evil he did, whether he merely embezzled or perjured himself or raped and murdered, is low: and he wrongly imagines that we can offset evil by appealing to those moments when we were "good."

It's like saying, "Yeah, sure, I raped and killed a girl; but I also worked for years in a children's charity, so let's call it a wash." Good luck making that appeal to any judge that has even a clue about justice or knows how the law works.

About his "integrity," he's wrong. And the "saving" of his self-image is the real problem: because it's the arrogance that keeps him from realizing how awful he's been, that he's a sinner, and of admitting to himself that nothing but the real help of God will get him out of the mess he is.

Self image is not the core of your being, but is the persona you show to others and your own ego. You have to be humble before you can find it, and being humble means privately getting rid of both self image and ego, besides ideas you want to believe but really cannot know.

It is possible to accept responsibility for your bad action or for a debt you owe purely from an intellectual view of morality. But taking responsibility, although it's good morality,won't save you from despair. Quid pro quo is not what being saved from despair is about. If there is Deity of Good I doubt if he would do quid pro quo. To save you from despair you have to feel a secret layer of your feelings that you might not be able to find the words for. I hope prisoners can feel this.

[Age]

I have embraced Christianity to the degree that I can (and remain in integrity with myself).

Nobody should be told to go beyond what they, in integrity, can believe. That's for sure.

At the same time, "Christian" is not just a term that can mean whatever I want it to mean. God has his own terms on which relationship with Him can be achieved; and those have to be respected at least as much -- and logically, more -- than any conditions a human may wish to impose from his or her side.

LOL STILL SEEING God as a gendered Being.

When 'you', "immanuel can", STOP putting your OWN conditions onto God, then you will be MUCH CLOSER to beginning to SEE what God ACTUALLY IS. You are only FOOLING "yourself" here "immanuel can".

We come to God on God's terms, or not at all -- even if we think we have.

YET here is "immanuel can" the ONE who BELIEVES it KNOWS what God's terms ARE.

WHY is it that the ones who BELIEVE and continually say what God's terms ARE, are frequently the ones who are the FURTHEST AWAY from what God's terms ACTUALLY ARE?

When, and IF, you discover, or learn, and understand thee answer to this, then you will have a MUCH BETTER relationship with God, Itself.

As I say I am an *intellectual Christian* in my external relations (the ideas I have and share, what I read, the way I order thought). But on the inner level all I can say is *I am what I am*.

Which, REALLY, says NOTHING, AT ALL.

If you do NOT YET even KNOW 'Who nor what 'I' am', then saying, "I am what I am", literally, is saying NOTHING AT ALL.

There is not really a way to share any of that in depth on a public forum and it would be rather vulgar to do so.

That's fair. And not everything is even suitable for sharing by private message.

For the ones who CLAIM, "I KNOW things, but I am unable to share them", then the only ones they are FOOLING here are "themselves" and maybe a few "others".

And, if things are NOT even suitable for sharing by private message, then there is an OBVIOUS SIGN that there is Wrong doing going on.

I'll let you set your own rules on that, of course, and not demand more.

Christianity is intellectual. It's intelligent, and capable of provoking deep philosophical insight, it's true. But it's never merely that. To be a Christian demands a commitment. Kierkegaard saw that. He despised the cold ritualism and shallow, uncommitted pseudo-Christianity of his Lutheran contemporaries, and called them out on their lack of a heart, over and over again.

And I am calling out, by SHOWING and HIGHLIGHTING your FAKE "christianity" "immanuel can". AND, because you can NOT and will NOT address what I am calling you out on PROVES just how COLD and SHALLOW a person you REALLY ARE.

And he was right.

What I say (or what I would say to someone who asked) is do not abandon or give up on Christianity.

I would say the only way somebody could do that is if he/she had never really known salvation or experienced being a Christian in the first place. Once one has really "been there," it's pretty clear that the last thing you would ever do is try to leave.

But MANY have left, BECAUSE they have SEEN the LIGHT, as some would say.

The Latin Mass is really just the tip of the iceberg as far as Traditional Catholicism goes. The liturgy, the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the philosophical and ethical writings, and also the historical prayers -- these open up into a world worth exploring in my opinion. It has been where I have gone to understand Christianity.

That's unfortunate. To be perfectly honest, I think you're looking for live bodies in a graveyard. There may be a few there, but they won't stay long. It's not a place for the living.

[Age]

Have you ever visited a penal institution...minimum, medium or maximum security? You'll find that it's positively filled with people who "introspect and find integrity" in themselves. They''ll tell you, "I'm a good guy, really; I don't belong in here." Even the most honest will only say, "I made a mistake...one mistake...but really, I'm a good person."

So much for the "introspection" and judgment of human beings. Whenever we judge ourselves, we always put our fingers down firmly on our own side of the scales. We're always "good enough" to satisfy "The Judicial Court of Me."

Compare ourselves to the righteousness of God, and we know where we really are. But almost nobody does that.

If the criminal, however revolting his crimes, finds that core respect for his own integrity then he has it and it saves him from despair.

His problem is not his self image. We all have lots of that. It's that he doesn't accept responsibility for anything the's done. His evaluation of the importance of all his "good" deeds is high, and his evalution of the evil he did, whether he merely embezzled or perjured himself or raped and murdered, is low: and he wrongly imagines that we can offset evil by appealing to those moments when we were "good."

It's like saying, "Yeah, sure, I raped and killed a girl; but I also worked for years in a children's charity, so let's call it a wash." Good luck making that appeal to any judge that has even a clue about justice or knows how the law works.

About his "integrity," he's wrong. And the "saving" of his self-image is the real problem: because it's the arrogance that keeps him from realizing how awful he's been, that he's a sinner, and of admitting to himself that nothing but the real help of God will get him out of the mess he is.

Do you KNOW who the REAL 'sinner' is here "immanuel can"?

If you do NOT, then I will TELL you, you are "immanuel can".

But, you can NOT YET SEE this and this is because you do NOT YET even KNOW what the words 'sin' and 'sinning' means and refers to, EXACTLY. You are, literally, sinning by your own lack of wisdom here and by your own foolish attempts at "wisdom" and of the Wrong judging of "others".

[Age]

If the criminal, however revolting his crimes, finds that core respect for his own integrity then he has it and it saves him from despair.

His problem is not his self image. We all have lots of that. It's that he doesn't accept responsibility for anything the's done. His evaluation of the importance of all his "good" deeds is high, and his evalution of the evil he did, whether he merely embezzled or perjured himself or raped and murdered, is low: and he wrongly imagines that we can offset evil by appealing to those moments when we were "good."

It's like saying, "Yeah, sure, I raped and killed a girl; but I also worked for years in a children's charity, so let's call it a wash." Good luck making that appeal to any judge that has even a clue about justice or knows how the law works.

About his "integrity," he's wrong. And the "saving" of his self-image is the real problem: because it's the arrogance that keeps him from realizing how awful he's been, that he's a sinner, and of admitting to himself that nothing but the real help of God will get him out of the mess he is.

Self image is not the core of your being, but is the persona you show to others and your own ego. You have to be humble before you can find it, and being humble means privately getting rid of both self image and ego, besides ideas you want to believe but really cannot know.

It is possible to accept responsibility for your bad action or for a debt you owe purely from an intellectual view of morality. But taking responsibility, although it's good morality,won't save you from despair. Quid pro quo is not what being saved from despair is about. If there is Deity of Good I doubt if he would do quid pro quo. To save you from despair you have to feel a secret layer of your feelings that you might not be able to find the words for. I hope prisoners can feel this.

Here is ANOTHER one who BELIEVES it has the answers but has OBVIOUSLY NOT YET even taken a good hard look at their OWN True 'self'.

All of this LOOKING AT, TALKING ABOUT, and the JUDGING of "others" while ALWAYS continually FORGETTING to LOOK AT and TALK ABOUT the Wrong that they DO.

[Janoah]

To believe what is written in the Torah, or in another book, and how to understand what is written, a person can decide only based on his conscience, if he is not a robot or a parrot.

A person can read, and decide what God is saying. Then he can decide to hear the word of God, or to ignore it.

Men like Abraham did not read, but spoke to God, as Torah says, "face to face."
So what "face" did Abraham, or Moses see, such a face as in icons, with a nose and hair?

[Immanuel Can]

To believe what is written in the Torah, or in another book, and how to understand what is written, a person can decide only based on his conscience, if he is not a robot or a parrot.

A person can read, and decide what God is saying. Then he can decide to hear the word of God, or to ignore it.

Men like Abraham did not read, but spoke to God, as Torah says, "face to face."
So what "face" did Abraham, or Moses see, such a face as in icons, with a nose and hair?

Well, that you're going to have to imagine. We're not told any details of that. But "face to face" is indeed the expression used. If you view it literally enough to insist on the question, as you do, then I suppose it's going to be you that's going to have to make up an answer.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I wrote:

...anything we do, any self-assertion, must take advantage of other living things. So if we clear a field to plant crops we must displace other life. When we cut down a tree we are doing what all creatures must do -- taking advantage of other forms of life.

That is true. But I'm not clear why that matters.

From the beginning, even before the Fall, plants were given to man for food. After the Fall, man began to be omnivorous...but now we're talking about a fallen, sinful world, not some ideal one. So there's no part of that that is hard to imagine, nor any that is not entirely consonant with what the Bible says is the case in a fallen world.

It matters a great deal to arrive at understanding of how religious philosophy and metaphysical philosophy develop in our world. It also matters a great deal to understand how religions and religiosity, and of course metaphysics and all the systems of perceiving and describing these systems, have been investigated so thoroughly. Because of a comparative perspective — consider William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience — the Christian religious system is seen in a different light, from a different perspective. On one hand it seems to undermine the specificity of a religious story, and thus weakens adherence to it, while simultaneously expanding the comprehension of the wide variety of religious experience and description.

So for example I recently read about half of Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer (edited by Joseph Campbell) and could only be deeply impressed by the detailed descriptions of the metaphysical views and the systems of picturing *reality* different peoples in that region developed. To have that background of the religions of the Indian Subcontinent helps me to understand those Indian religions which made headway in the West such as Vedanta, the various schools of yoga, Paramahansa Yogananda, and then of course those intrepid distributors of incense in world airports, the Hare Krishnas.

These religions have made headway for a group of reasons certainly, but one of them must be grasped: dissatisfaction with our own religious models because they lack sufficient explanatory power and authority. It is a very curious problem this self-undertaken undermining of one’s own foundations; or the expansion of those foundations when other traditions and ways-of-being are explored. One can locate those *explorers* and also those expanders and underminers — just for one example I will mention DH Lawrence, though not specifically a religious figure, nevertheless he embodied profound dissatisfaction with the reigning order and through expansion of it, also undermined it.

It goes somewhat beyond the scope of this present conversation but I was very interested in Waldo Frank’s notion that a dying structure in processes of inanition and morbidity is not a static state of affairs: in a dying body all the individual cells light up because death-process in an organism is in no sense the end of activity. There is a whole world of activity in the dying body. Putrescence is hyper-active. (Waldo Frank traces out what he describes as a wide, cultural ‘death-process’ brought about by the undermining of one metaphysical order (briefly scholasticism) and its replacement with the now reigning order — scientism. Scientism is a strange metaphysics. We are all well within it and I think you are too. It is these transformations in how things are seen and described that give rise (very directly) to Belinda’s and Lacewing’s (and Uwot’s if I can mention another one) opposition to your structure-of-view.

That ‘by the way’ . . .

I get the impression that you do not grasp what I am trying to get at when I locate the Christian stance or outlook as having elements profoundly resisting of ‘natural processes’. Christianity enters the world as an opposition. It takes a stand in opposition to *the world* in the cultural sense, but also because it must oppose and it does oppose ‘the natural order’. This is rather basic Nietzschean analysis but it is not unsound. It is not irrelevant.

Similarly, the Indian religions I reference also had this *oppositional* element. And it seems to me that the major religious systems that we could name arise out of a shared motive: of opposition to a restraining — indeed imprisoning — surrounding order. To see, or to create a diagram, where the soul’s entrapment is pictured, where it is perceived, then leads to the need to explain it. And to explain a way out of the entrapment, the ‘material entanglement’. A Christian refers to a nearly ridiculous story of a *fall* out of free and delightful circumstances in a primeval garden. It is a child’s story of course but effective as an illustration.

Yet the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita develops the notion of the soul’s (the jiva’s) entrapment in ‘the material entanglement’ with a detailed, systematic description. Yet these two perspectives arise out of a similar perception and a way of seeing and describing *reality*. The Bhagavad-Gita also diagrams a reversal of the process by which the soul incarnated down into this material-biological realm. And that is the ‘means of escape’. That of course has a great deal to do with transcendence as a general notion, but a transcendental solution as a specific response.

[Immanuel Can]

Yet the philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita develops the notion of the soul’s (the jiva’s) entrapment in ‘the material entanglement’ with a detailed, systematic description. Yet these two perspectives arise out of a similar perception and a way of seeing and describing *reality*. The Bhagavad-Gita also diagrams a reversal of the process by which the soul incarnated down into this material-biological realm. And that is the ‘means of escape’. That of course has a great deal to do with transcendence as a general notion, but a transcendental solution as a specific response.

I do not think that one can fairly and realistically see the Christian diagram (the picture of life) as being essentially different when compared to that described in Indian philosophy.

Holy cow, yes you can.

The Gita describes a very different God from the Judeo-Christian one, a God of compassion contrasted with a giant mouth of nasty, fatalistic teeth. There's also a very different -- indeed, opposite -- morality. In Christianity, you love your enemies; in the Gita, you charge in and kill them with abandon. We might add that the attitude to material reality is also the dead opposite: in Genesis, creation of material reality is said to be "very good." In Hinduism, material reality is imprisonment in a realm of samsara, suffering, and is to be escaped at all costs.

Wow, if you can't see differences like that, I don't know what to tell you. There is no way Hinduism and Judaism/Christianity allign at all. One can only imagine that by really knowing nothing about either one of them.

[Alexis Jacobi]

LOL

This is sort of an aside but I needed to mention that every time you write *LOL* somewhere in the world a child’s puppy dies. We are talking about really gorgeous doe-eyed girls and boys who find their puppies dismembered right in their living rooms. When lol is CAPITALIZED the puppies actually explode and the guts have to be peeled off the child! You are creating a great deal of pain & anguish. I can only beg you — I make this ethical appeal — that you please consider stopping this horrifying activity. For the sake of what is noble and good!

[Alexis Jacobi]

The Gita describes a very different God from the Judeo-Christian one, a God of compassion contrasted with a giant mouth of nasty, fatalistic teeth. There's also a very different -- indeed, opposite -- morality. In Christianity, you love your enemies; in the Gita, you charge in and kill them with abandon. We might add that the attitude to material reality is also the dead opposite: in Genesis, creation of material reality is said to be "very good." In Hinduism, material reality is imprisonment in a realm of samsara, suffering, and is to be escaped at all costs.

Wow, if you can't see differences like that, I don't know what to tell you. There is no way Hinduism and Judaism/Christianity allign at all. One can only imagine that by really knowing nothing about either one of them.

You assume that I do not see or note *the difference*. But that is not what I am talking about. I am talking more about the way that men — humans and humankind — conceive of and diagram the world.

The issue has more to do with man’s ‘lenses of perception’ when they gaze out on Reality than it does with ‘the God’ who is revealed or, as we must say, reveals himself.

Even in the Hebrew story, as everyone knows, God seems to come into focus over a long period of time. There is of course a rather terrible original god-conception (a god associated with storms and atmosphere) that later gets refined.

Also what you are not taking into consideration is that though it is very true that when god is visualized in parts of the Gita, Arjuna *sees* god in a terrible aspect that is in most senses a description of the terrible world of nature (universes being consumed by black holes, universes crashing one into the others, terrible determined natural processes), while the figure of Krishna is a manifestation of pure benevolence.

I am only speaking of the way a god-conception came to be pictured. I am not advocating Vaishnavism (the worship of Vishnu.

And I do recognize, and have written in this thread, numerous core differences between *our traditions* and those of the Orient.

The Gita describes a very different God from the Judeo-Christian one, a God of compassion contrasted with a giant mouth of nasty, fatalistic teeth. There's also a very different -- indeed, opposite -- morality. In Christianity, you love your enemies; in the Gita, you charge in and kill them with abandon. We might add that the attitude to material reality is also the dead opposite: in Genesis, creation of material reality is said to be "very good." In Hinduism, material reality is imprisonment in a realm of samsara, suffering, and is to be escaped at all costs.

I assume, because of what I might guess are your own biases, that you will misconstrue what I am trying to talk about and establish as a fair and necessary aspect that needs to be established in this conversation.

One aspect of the views developed on the Indian continent had to do with *samsara*, but there were numerous views and descriptions. All that I have said is that these different views can be placed side-by-side as it were and compared. Comparison has a beneficial aspect but it also has an undermining aspect.

I am not sure if you recognize that in the Occident the so-called *Christian world-picture* has been substantially undermined. I did not do this. I am not advocating it. I am trying to explain it. My view is that to the degree it can be understood, there exists the possibility of remediating the circumstances that arise from it (loosely described as ‘nihilism’).

Nihilism, it just occurs to me, could be compared to an awareness of ‘samsara’ if samsara is taken as ‘wandering without sufficient knowledge — empowering knowledge — in a world that one cannot make sense of’. And in this condition of samsara-nihilism the person, the soul, the individual, gets necessarily very desperate and anxious.

So the larger conversation that interests me is to see and to understand what happened in the surrounding culture, but also what has happened with us and in us. Because if this is not seen and understood, it seems to me, there can take place no remediation.

Personally, I think your choices (your focus, what you say, your apologetics in essence) are not complete enough. And this is the tack I take in this conversation yet without any desire to offend or attack you or anyone. That cannot be a genuine purpose given the depth of the problem we face — as individuals and also as a civilization).

[Immanuel Can]

It matters a great deal to arrive at understanding of how religious philosophy and metaphysical philosophy develop in our world. It also matters a great deal to understand how religions and religiosity, and of course metaphysics and all the systems of perceiving and describing these systems, have been investigated so thoroughly. Because of a comparative perspective — consider William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience — the Christian religious system is seen in a different light, from a different perspective. On one hand it seems to undermine the specificity of a religious story, and thus weakens adherence to it, while simultaneously expanding the comprehension of the wide variety of religious experience and description.

James was badly wrong. He was wrong in the very way that was common to his day...the way people like Frazer and Paden were also badly wrong.

What they all try to do is make Humanism the master-metanarrative, and to force all religious traditions to be nothing more than some expression of a "common human impulse," rather than any sort of unique way or truth. Of course, no religion sees itself that way, and it can only be done by denying all religions any substantial content at all. But worse than that, it can only be done by placing them all in such fuzzy focus that one is really not seeing them at all. The price of this belief, then, is forcing one's mind into an artificial state of non-specificity, where the observer doesn't even really look at the data at all, but rather "hovers over" it all with the Humanist ideology in mind instead.

These religions have made headway for a group of reasons certainly, but one of them must be grasped: dissatisfaction with our own religious models because they lack sufficient explanatory power and authority.

Well, Humanism is both lacking in explanatory power and authority. You're right. So that's why, in the West, it was abandoned by so many in the '60s for the kind of fuzzy-focused "Beatles Buddhism" that eventually yielded other bizarre religions like "The New Age." People could not long be fooled by secular Humanism. It's got too little going for it, and it cannot answer the most important questions at all.

That ‘by the way’ . . .

I get the impression that you do not grasp what I am trying to get at when I locate the Christian stance or outlook as having elements profoundly resisting of ‘natural processes’. Christianity enters the world as an opposition. It takes a stand in opposition to *the world* in the cultural sense, but also because it must oppose and it does oppose ‘the natural order’. This is rather basic Nietzschean analysis but it is not unsound. It is not irrelevant.

You're making a mistake about what "the natural order" actually is, and mistaking it for "the present condition" of the world, which is a very different thing. The real "natural order" is good, and devoid of sin. The "present condition" is a world of fallenness and sin. It is not desirable to confuse the two, for many reasons, but one chief one being that if sin is "the natural condition," then it's not merely incurable and inexplicable, it's actually the closest thing we can have to a "good" order.

And that is one reason why Nietzsche had to demand that we should abandon moral categories altogether. He wanted to make "the life force" or "the will to power" out to be "good' things -- or at least as "good" as anything can ever be. But that's really just a confession of the total failure of his system to be able to explain sin. He was doubling down on a disastrous dead-end, in that regard, positing a world of no morals to get away from having to account for evil.

His solution to cancer was not any kind of cancer surgery or therapy, but to rename cancer as "health."

To see, or to create a diagram, where the soul’s entrapment is pictured,

Yeah, that's just Gnostic. It's totally anti-Christian. Both Christians and Jews have rejected that "picture" totally...and justly so. Torah does not paint the picture that way, and denies that core portrayal of creation.

Hinduism tries to solve the problem of alienation from God by denying the value of material reality itself. Like Nietzscheanism, it's a "cure" that is far, far worse than the disease itself, and actually cures nothing. It "solves" the manifiest and universal problem of suffering merely by denying that suffering is real at all.

What an empty answer that is!

[Immanuel Can]

Even in the Hebrew story, as everyone knows, God seems to come into focus over a long period of time. There is of course a rather terrible original god-conception (a god associated with storms and atmosphere) that later gets refined.

I think that's totally wrong. I read the Hebrew Scriptures a lot, and I don't at all see God portrayed that way.

Also what you are not taking into consideration is that though it is very true that when god is visualized in parts of the Gita, Arjuna *sees* god in a terrible aspect that is in most senses a description of the terrible world of nature (universes being consumed by black holes, universes crashing one into the others, terrible determined natural processes), while the figure of Krishna is a manifestation of pure benevolence.

I've read it. In fact, I have it right here, on my shelf.

The "god" of the Gita is a giant slavvering maw of Fate. There's no live, no "benevolence" and no tenderness in that portrayal, and you must not forget that this "god" IS Krishna. Remember, Arjuna asks Krishna to manifest himself as he really is, and that is how he manifests. That's the truth of what he is, under the thin veneer of "benevolence." He's a nasty piece of work.

[Alexis Jacobi]

He's a nasty piece of work.

I do not imagine I will be able to say much that could affect or modify your bias — your bias is evident, obviously, but please note that I have also pointed out that strong opinions, strong value-declarations, and rigid metaphysics, are necessary when a given system is defined, explained and defended. And this is what you do. This is your purpose here and on this forum: to defend a specific religious orientation.

You are free to generally describe the religion of Krishna — and the rise of the religion of Caitanya in the Mediaeval Era is what I am talking about — as a ‘nasty piece of work’ if that suits your purposes. In my case it would be impossible to see the Caitanya phenomenon as a manifestation of something terrible as you state it. Even if I am not involved in it and even if I critique it.

To actually understand it involves a fair-minded effort to *see* it. And to see it as I recommend it can be seen will necessitate putting aside one’s own cultural biases as they are called. As I point out this is the realm of ‘comparative religion’ and it has both a positive and a negative aspect. On one hand it augments understanding, but on another it can undermine specific commitment.

The "god" of the Gita is a giant slavvering maw of Fate.

The slavering maw of fate needs to be seen and understood. In this sense our present view of the cosmos diagrams that *maw*. It is a world of physical mechanics and is a pefect picture of the *maw* you describe.

[Immanuel Can]

He's a nasty piece of work.

I do not imagine I will be able to say much that could affect or modify your bias

It's not a "bias." I have the Gita right here. I can point you to the relevant passages.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Yeah, that's just Gnostic. It's totally anti-Christian. Both Christians and Jews have rejected that "picture" totally...and justly so. Torah does not paint the picture that way, and denies that core portrayal of creation.

Hinduism tries to solve the problem of alienation from God by denying the value of material reality itself. Like Nietzscheanism, it's a "cure" that is far, far worse than the disease itself, and actually cures nothing. It "solves" the manifiest and universal problem of suffering merely by denying that suffering is real at all.

There is no doubt that any religious or metaphysical description that I could be offered, if it comes from Jainism, Buddhism or Vedanta (etc.) can only be described as ‘gnostic’! Because these are systems of knowledge, and systems of organization of perception and description.

I cannot quite go along with you when you declare as *anti-Christian* any view, any description, that arises out of different systems-of-view and understanding. But I do understand the function of that sort of condemnatory declaration. And that function can be brought out in the open to be talked about, which is of course all that I am doing!

What an empty answer that is!

But I have not attempted any answer. I am talking about different ways that Reality has been pictured and, as I say, diagrammed.

You seem to want to put the kibosh on a widening of the general conversation.

My assertion is that this widening cannot but be done. We must do it. To understand how people are thinking in our present time requires a careful examination. And addtionally for you to better understand the perspectives of your various interlocutors necessitates more background.