Christianity

[Dubious]

...what would I be afraid to suggest?

You're going to have to tell me. I have no idea what you're ashamed of.

To know that I would have to know what you're talking about or how "shame" enters any part of the conversation! No idea what you're referring to or how it relates. Another question, would anyone at this point know what you're talking about!

[Dontaskme]

Nope. That wasn't interesting.

Too bad you know yourself as not very interesting. Maybe that's because there is nothing else here to capture your attention but a reflection of yourself. I'm not very interesting either, unless I imagine I am..

Where did you get the original image of yourself from IC?

Oh that's right, it came to you from the inside of a mirror. ..didn't it, huh! huh!

You had no way of knowing your original face is from God, you had to have it mirrored to you by your own self you imagine is God.

It's no wonder you do not find that story interesting, it's not your story, only your story of things is interesting...isn't that right, huh!


Let go IC, resistance is futile. And remember to not cling onto the air on the way down, that won't save you either.

Reflections do not have biological fathers called God...ok.

[Dubious]

In traditional Christian thought the error of the first man (and woman), Adam/Eve, is corrected and repaired with the intervention of God/Jesus. In my own view there is no other way to be able to grasp the story, and the metaphysics into which it fits, unless one resolves to go back to and examine in depth the former metaphysical system which gave birth to the conception.

One made-up story to justify another made-up story; I wouldn’t call that metaphysics but more in the nature of forcing absurdity into a simulacrum of credence.

The modern conception -- of life, of the world, of being, of ourselves and of the self -- is in itself a sort of monorail. One has to be trained in it which also implies dis-training and untraining in the other, former viewstructure, in order to adopt it entirely and also authentically. It seems pretty obvious that certain modern minds -- I will mention A. Huxley and C.G. Jung though there are a hundred -- were forced to confront the problem of the monorail-like nature of the compelling and rather totalizing modern view. So what did they do? It seems to me that they re-approached the same *material* if I can refer to it in that way, and plumbed it from within their extremely modern position or orientation. It is pretty obvious that there was an entire movement in this direction and I should also have mentioned D.H Lawrence.

To quote…

Bereft of symbols to a wasteland grown
We pray in temples to an empty throne.

...which feels the coldness of empty space prior to reevaluating its function when the old beliefs have vacated. That’s how I regard the modern emphasis to create meaning whether or not it has a chance of succeeding. Maybe it’s not yet cold enough!

I think it is fair to say that, in one way or another, to one degree or another, they all responded to The Prophecies of Nietzsche, and that Nietzsche completely embodied the dislocation produced in the contrast between the two metaphysical system. To the degree that one has no choice but to see the world (literally the cosmos) in modern terms is the degree to which one can no longer *see* God which really means something more in fact. It seems to mean to be 'cut off' from vast ranges of what I refer to as *meaning* and also *value* that can only ever be approached from a position within the self. That is, as one sits within one's self and discovers and lives though its relations not with the *outer world* (which we only see with modern eyes) but in and through the *inner world*. In my own case that is why I often refer to Gloucester's "I stumbled when I saw" and also Blake:

It’s the outer world which is the great educator and upon which the inner world depends for meaning. Even knowing oneself depends on some version of an outside-in transformation. It’s the former which seeds the latter as individually interpreted and appreciated.

I would not so much try to propose that simply by noting all of this that that in itself amounts to the resolution of the problem, but rather that the problem must be better seen. And what is that problem? It revolves around being 'cut off'. However, I am aware that the hardened *atheist*, if I can refer to him in that way, scoffs at all that I have said here as 'sophistic apologetics'.

There are atheists who scoff and atheists who examine. What is an atheist? It certainly describes those who allow no credence to god’s existence but does it also apply to someone who rejects all that biblical nonsense regarding it only in historical terms? You decide.

For the problem to be better seen requires a mind that can accept the fact there is no inherent meaning in existence per se, the cosmos being as thoroughly devoid of it as an empty canvas. Morality too cannot exist without being entrenched in meaning especially so when not in the least magnified, subsumed under some divine heading. Such would amount to an overlord proclaiming rather than knowing through examination what seems right and ethical.

No god ever told us anything; those rules we had to write ourselves.

But what is curious, from where I stand, is that no matter how one looks at the problem (of existing in the shadow of one metaphysics and in the dawn of another entire view that has not yet come into focus -- the dawn as Nietzsche described it) is that even those who tried to explore another way into a more holistic world, inside and outside, have seemed still to have *failed*. And I say that because, still, the ship of being founders.

I agree. The holistic or what once seemed so, has dismembered itself into incompatible parts and nothing will ever put Humpty Dumpty together again. But I wonder does any new integrated image have to be holistic to be successful! Why shouldn't meaning be separated into different domains not unlike science itself? Why should it express only one thing as summary of a holistic presence?

So with that said I have to give some recognition to what Nick here has often spoken of. It is the mystery of the inner relationship.

Also true if a mystery resolves itself into something knowable, no-longer merely subsisting as an offer of perpetual hope which is the best a non-ceasing mystery can provide.

In any case this is how I resolve some of these issues. The other *trick* and *manoeuvre* as it were that I employ is to stand fully away from The Elements of Story and to see, simply, that no story is ever the story's meaning. The *meaning* stands independent and mysteriously separate from the story-line.

Fairy tales and myth are the most bountiful in extracting meaning from a simple story as the carrier wave transmitting the message.

Anyway, this response is longer than intended and it's already late.

[Belinda]

It's worth noting it's not foxes, herbs, olive trees, or cattle that God expels from Eden. Of all created beings it is man and only man that questions God's ordered world of Eden. Man alone of all created beings has the impudence to ask questions about the nature of good and evil and must follow the course he himself set out on. The freedom of thought that man wrested from God is not altogether a happy freedom to have, and the other creatures are happier in their quiescence.

[Sculptor]

It's worth noting it's not foxes, herbs, olive trees, or cattle that God expels from Eden. Of all created beings it is man and only man that questions God's ordered world of Eden. Man alone of all created beings has the impudence to ask questions about the nature of good and evil and must follow the course he himself set out on. The freedom of thought that man wrested from God is not altogether a happy freedom to have, and the other creatures are happier in their quiescence.

God must have been really stupid to have made man such that he would be a sinner.
SO much for omniscience!

[promethean75]

You're goddamn right. And I'll tell ya sumthin else, too. I ain't about to be punished for of the sins of my moms and pops. I had nuthin to so wit dat shit.

[Alexis Jacobi]

One made-up story to justify another made-up story; I wouldn’t call that metaphysics but more in the nature of forcing absurdity into a simulacrum of credence.

In my case I am not incapable of putting myself inside the (apparent) viewstructure that you inhabit; understanding its predicates and also understanding what conclusions are necessary to that viewstructure. So, the core predicate you are working with is that a metaphysic, and metaphysics, are a 'man-made story', and note that you use the word 'made-up'.

What is made-up is unreal and what is made-up is also false. So what you are saying -- I mean in its operative sense -- is that the false should be done away with and be replaced by what is true and also real.

I have made an effort to study the system of thought that I describe through the term The Great Chain of Being. And if someone were to say "It is a false imposition onto the real world" I would, at the least, know why they say that. I could understand. But if you asked me "Well, but do you agree?" I would have to say that I do not agree. But to express why, coherently and responsibly, involves a lot of careful explication. I would also have to be aware of my own *motives* and that is something I have placed emphasis on: what motivates each of us in this specific conversation. I have not heard any one of you write out what you core motives are. I find this a kind of *tell*. It reveals something.

What interests me, in the larger picture, is the core motives in the attack on Christian belief. This is not a gentle attack and, as I have observed it, it is often extremely vicious. While I also detest and have contempt for the emblematic dullard Christian (dangerous dullard at times) who is very easy to encounter (the Pat Robertson type and perhaps worse the Benny Hinn type), I have no doubt at this point in my own studies that the dullard does not define what Christianity is, and therefore, and in my opinion, what is important in it and about it.

So let's say -- if this is true -- that you (Dubious) are just one more among millions who operates from a motivational platform of *ripping down*. I want to know more about *you* and what motivates you. What you are trying to do away with and what you are trying to replace it with. It is a complex sociological-philosophical and also cultural issue that is not easy to solve. On one hand I likely will be able to understand at least the superficial structure of your claim against *Christianity* (and here I can refer to your battle against one emissary of it, fellow forum participant IC). But my view is that IC is not *Christianity* though he seems to purport to be so. Thus, the implication is to go far beyond specific personalities that represent ideas or notions (true or mistaken, accurate or misunderstood) and try to get to the *core* of those ideas.

Now I come to respond to your assertions about what is true and what is false. But one has to back up, once again, a few paces and make preliminary statements.

My view which I came to a few years back (I do not think it is very radical and it is quite intuitive) is that what Christianity proposes, and what motivates it, and how it expresses itself, is through contradiction. I see 'Christian metaphysics' as what I call an 'imposition' into and in this sense against the natural order. Christianity therefore, if seen in this way, is not *natural* to Nature nor to the natural systems. Those systems operate according to blind, thoughtless in that sense, determined ways that are devoid of *idea*. I think we all see this and I think we all very well understand what 'nature' is.

So I think we then have a way of approaching an examination of all the systems, the systems of thought, the interpretive systems, and also the imposed systems, that man discovers and establishes (you will say 'invents' and 'makes up') that act, essentially, in contradiction to 'the way of the world'. Now, you regard these are made-up and therefore false-unreal. And you also propose to *tear down* what you believe is false-unreal. But I do not in any sense agree with what you are saying! I do not want to share in your *project*.

So as a result of this, as a result of having the position I do, I do not have a choice except to investigate metaphysics -- the notion of *imposition* into and against 'nature' and nature's determinism -- and to develop better understanding and of course respect and apreciation for all that metaphysical, impositional systems achieve. So what I have realized -- and it seems sound to me -- is that what they achieve is everything that we really value and everything that, to put it dramatically, makes life worth living.

Is all of that 'false'? Is all of that 'unreal'? To answer that question involves examining the invisible power of Idea -- these notions that enter our world and determine so much of what we do. When I encounter *people like you* (If I can use such a broad term, and in fact I cannot and do not know much at all about you and it is not possible to know you through the Internet and this splotchy forum writing) I notice that your efforts are not altogether 'creative' and have destructive elements. (But you know this because I have said that so many times.)

So how would I and how do I describe, in general terms, what I think you are up to? What is your motivation and what do you set out to achieve? This is not easy to answer . . .

On one hand you want to do away with and disempower that *invisible* but extremely relevant and potent side of Idea that enters our world, from heaven knows where, and contradicts the terrifying and the cruel and meaningless aspect of natural life-processes. In this sense I would say that, like Gloucester, when you had your two eyes you were in fact 'blind'. You missed the larger picture and you also missed seeing and understanding a truth and truths that simply sail over your head. You establish that your 'blind seeing' is the best way to see. And *you* also dominate the sphere of communication. And of course you *work in packs*.

I do not take a condemnatory stance against *you* (this grand plurality I refer to often). Instead I try to understand the counter-assertion of those crude and destructive ideas that operate against what I have termed 'the metaphysical impositions'. I feel that I know enough to be able to say that it is there, in that area, in that invisible substance of Idea, that the best and the most worthwhile exists and is preserved. You might say it is all 'unreal' and 'made-up' and if you did you would be making an enormously erroneous statement. In fact a really terrible (and terrifying) lie.

[Nick_A]

Dubious

It’s the outer world which is the great educator and upon which the inner world depends for meaning. Even knowing oneself depends on some version of an outside-in transformation. It’s the former which seeds the latter as individually interpreted and appreciated.

Science can teach new relationships between facts experienced in the outer world. It is the quality of contemplations of inner man which enables a person to remember what has been forgotten. Is the story of Adam and Eve an expression of evolution or of involution: away from the source?

[Alexis Jacobi]

I agree. The holistic or what once seemed so, has dismembered itself into incompatible parts and nothing will ever put Humpty Dumpty together again. But I wonder does any new integrated image have to be holistic to be successful! Why shouldn't meaning be separated into different domains not unlike science itself? Why should it express only one thing as summary of a holistic presence?

This is an interesting question. The best *attempt at an answer* that I came across was what Waldo Frank (who wrote in the 1920-1930s) stated in The Re-Discovery of America (1929). Briefly, and in his condensed and clipped way of expressing it, he saw that the *body of Europe* was in a death-process. That is, that the certainties upon which Europe was constructed which he describes in the chapter 'The Sense of the Whole', had come undone. And he enumerates these ideas that had come to seem false:

1) That man lives in a universe in which his earth is the heart. The universe revolves around him.
2) Man is lord of all creatures. He is an independent creation. Above him are only the gods and God himself.
3) Man's reason is absolutely true; faith can be placed in it. Or --
4) Man's faith is reasonable; it is indeed inspired by contact with divinity.
5) Man can know what is good and what is evil.
6) Practice makes good for life and blessedness, it is wisdom. The contrary practice leads to death and damnation.
7) Reason and faith reveal divinity.
8 ) Divinity is good and is one, and is concerned in man's well-being.
9) Man's conception of the natural world, while not complete, is fundamentally correct. This is so because (take your choice --)
a) The senses give us reality
b) Reason correct the senses, giving us reality
c) God, wisdom, faith, supplement and correct senses and reason, giving us reality.
10) We know what matter is, even if we cannot create it.
11) We know what thought is, as separate from matter.
12) The law of cause and effect, on which rest logic and science of all kinds, is absolute.
13) Time and Space are real; they are independent of our minds; we are within them, rather than they within us.
14) Human individuality -- all is soul, spirit, ego -- exists, not relatively, but absolutely in Time and Space.

He describes these as the 'blocks' with which the House was built "The conceptual body of Western Europe". And he says, a bit later:

Consider these laws in the light of modern thought: you will find that everyone of them is gone. They were the foundation blocks of our House; they have vanished. We cannot dwell on the process of their disappearance; for that process is largely the histroy of modern times. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, wrecjed our comfortable cosmos. Lamarck, Geothe, Darwin worked at our biological dethronement. The sure structure of our faith and reason, wherein resided our certainties of the true, the beautiful, and the good, had been already challenged by the smothered heresy of Duns Scotus, who declared the will as independent of the intellect. Now came Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Freud to make havoc of the whole considerate construction of our ethics and logic -- of man's ability to know and power to judge. The physical universe began to crumble [...]

He goes on at some length in the same line.

And what he communicates is that the Unified Body held together by these unifying truths began to die.

You can gauge the state of Europe's cultural decomposition, by contrasting it with the Body wherein Dante dwelt. Everything there had its place, moved with a purposeful rhythm into the Whole. From God to priest, from Emperor to serf, from Heaven to Hell, from star to atom, from good to evil, all was integral. This was a world, moreover, in which Dante lived together with his cook. That Whole is gone. But organic death does not mean inanition. Look at any corpse advanced in its decay, and see how live it is. Europe swarms in death.

So with that as a backdrop, let's examine your question:

But I wonder does any new integrated image have to be holistic to be successful! Why shouldn't meaning be separated into different domains not unlike science itself? Why should it express only one thing as summary of a holistic presence?

[Alexis Jacobi]

For the problem to be better seen requires a mind that can accept the fact there is no inherent meaning in existence per se, the cosmos being as thoroughly devoid of it as an empty canvas. Morality too cannot exist without being entrenched in meaning especially so when not in the least magnified, subsumed under some divine heading. Such would amount to an overlord proclaiming rather than knowing through examination what seems right and ethical.

No god ever told us anything; those rules we had to write ourselves.

I present this paragraph because, as it seems to me, you operate from the dissolved platform Waldo speaks about, if I can call it that, that was once the holistic perspective of the Whole.

And now you are making specific, and consequential statements, about what reality is and what it is not. You now tell me and you declare and you sermonize to me and to anyone who will listen

"the fact there is no inherent meaning in existence per se, the cosmos being as thoroughly devoid of it as an empty canvas".

[per se: of, in, or by itself or oneself; intrinsically.]

Your idea obviously has all sorts of different levels of consequence and around your idea an activist philosophy, an ethics, must develop.

I can see your point: "No god ever told us anything" and "those rules we had to write ourselves", but I do not think you are seeing with enough depth of vision. All that we are, all that we think, all that we extract out of the invisible realm (if you will accept this metaphor) is part-and-parcel of what we are at the level when we are dealing in the Ideas that also exist in our own Cosmos and which, as one might say, 'come down to us from a realm outside of the determined world of strict nature'.

So in case it is not obvious I challenge your sense of what is, and what is not, intrinsic. You seem to gloss over, to deny in fact, what is obviously and perennially intrinsic through an odd act of your will: the declaration as I call it.

[iambiguous]

So far as I can tell, you can't even find the reasons you believe "evil" is a thing.

What I believe is that...

1] when human beings interact their wants and needs often come into conflict
2] as a result of this, within any particular human community, there are going to be "rules of behavior" that reward some behaviors and punish others
3] these rules will revolve around one or another historical and cultural combination of right makes might, might makes right and democracy and the rule of law
4] going back to the pre-Socratics in the West and their equivalent in the East, philosophy was invented...out of which came Ethics
5] ethicists "thought up" different ways to approach conflicting human behaviors. One of which was to make a "philosophical" distinction between Good and Evil
6] and then [of course] the role that God and religion play in all of it down through the ages and across the globe

Now, bring all of this down to Earth in regard to a particular set of circumstances, and we can discuss our own respective moral philosophers.

Well, the difficulty I'm having in understanding your view is not that I think you're not a moral person, or that you don't believe in good and evil, or that you don't know ethicists we can talk about. All of that, I take as obvious. I would assume you're a conventionally "decent" person, in other words.

My problem is that I see no rational warrant for an Atheist to say that "evil" exists as anything at all. For it may be that human beings have invented mountains of whimsy around ideas like "good" and "evil," but there is really nothing more than unicorns and pixies underneath all that. The fact that somebody has chosen to believe in "evil" does not show that "evil" is a real thing. It just shows that humans can believe odd and untrue things.

And it may be that there are even social conventions that have been formed around such illusions. So even if we say, "Well, evil isn't ontologically real, but it is a sort of phenomenological or sociological belief," that doesn't help at all. For it leaves us uncertain that the sociological phenomenon itself refers to anything that is real. And when we consider that societies have formed their "ethical" beliefs in contradictory and mutually-opposite ways, we can no longer turn to social phenomenology to provide us with any reason to think that "good" and "evil" have reality of their own.

So I'm still waiting to see how, from an Atheistic perspective, anybody can rationalize using the word "evil." We need to be able to show that the word refers to some objective reality. But what objective reality would that be?

Really, I've found there are many here who, like you, prefer that a discussion of "evil"/evil/Evil go on and on and on and on up on the intellectual skyhooks.

Well, I'm not one of them.

Over and over and over again we are confronted with actual flesh and blood human beings accusing each other of evil behavior. They give us reasons for that. Now from my frame of mind the reasons revolve more around the profoundly problematic parameters of dasein than around anything approaching an objective deontological assessment. Whether derived from Humanism or from God/religion.

Again...

"Now, [let us] bring all of this down to Earth [again] in regard to a particular set of circumstances, and we can discuss our own respective moral philosophers."

Unicorns and pixies?

An atheist and a Christian choosing to interact with other human beings have got to come up with some word to make a distinction between behaviors he or she approves of and behaviors he or she does not approve of. [Good and evil are among the word-sounds that English speaking people invented.

The rest is history. With or without the Christian God.]

That's not going to be a good answer, obviously.

And yet clearly for all practical purposes down through the centuries in community after community after community, that is precisely what human beings have done. After all, is there an alternative? Maybe the words used aren't "good" and "evil", "moral" and "immoral", "ethical" and "unethical", "virtue" and "vice", "sinful" and "righteous"...maybe they are something else instead. But one way or another words will be invented that revolve around rewarding some behaviors and punishing others. With or without God.

Then [from my frame of mind] straight back up into the didactic clouds...

It requires you to accept an equivalence between "evil" and "what you and I approve." But when and how did you and I become the moral arbiters of the universe? When did my "approval" become so important to the indifferent cosmos? That seems kind of wildly implausible, doesn't it?

Now, if you were to say that your approval and my approval of particular things may end up being intuitively reflective of some objective "evil" out there, I must concede that's possible. But since Atheism has no grounds for any conception of "evil," how can I ask you to have so much faith in my "approval" or even your own as simply to blithely assume it MUST reflect some objective "evil"? It might, it might not. And of course, both you and I are capable of having incorrect intuitions, and of "approving" things that maybe we shouldn't.

Whatever the case is, it surely would have to be demonstrated with reference to an objective conception of "evil."

Key word: "conception". An objective conception of "evil". Whereas the objectivists among us don't frame it as "evil". Certain behaviors are flat out Evil to them. And some have their very own "private and personal" God [Christian or otherwise] to back that up. Indeed, some will even take it so far as to insists that Evil people will be judged by God and sentenced for all eternity to Hell.

Go ahead, ask them.

Look, here's the bottom line, iam. I'm going to make it as simple as I can.

You want to talk about why an ominpotent and benevolent God would allow evil.

But "evil," you say, is a social or historical construct. And constructs are merely arbitrary, unless they refer to something objective, and when they don't, they are not just constructs but illusions as well.

And you ever and always want to put "evil" in these things: "....". And, ironically enough, so do I. I do it, however, because here and now in a No God world, "I" don't believe mere mortals can establish definitively when any behaviors are inherently/necessarily Evil.

"Evil" is derived from the complex intertwining of genes and memes as they interact over time historically and across the globe culturally. And then re the OP I note above, each of us as individuals come to have our own unique existential trajectory of experiences and relationships and access to information and knowledge and ideas and ideals that predispose us to think that things like abortion are or are not irrational, immoral, evil.

It seems to me you're playing both sides of the street. Evil IS NOT objective for your own purposes, but IS objective when you want to accuse God. How does that work?

And that is because if there is an omniscient and omnipotent Christian God "up there" and, as most Christians insist, Judgment Day is the real deal, how can Sin = Evil not be an objective thing? After all, Heaven or Hell itself is on the line.

Or, as with some over at ILP, does your own "private and personal" Christian God not include Judgement Day or Heaven or Hell?

Now, in a No God world how can behaviors mere mortals construe to be either "good" or "evil" not be but existential constructs rooted historically, culturally, socially, politically, etc., out in particular worlds understood in particular ways?

So I come down to this simple question: is there an objective "evil" with which you can charge God?

Or: is there an objective Christian God able to actually differentiate Good from Evil on Judgment Day?

[RCSaunders]

It's worth noting it's not foxes, herbs, olive trees, or cattle that God expels from Eden. Of all created beings it is man and only man that questions God's ordered world of Eden.

You forgot the snake.

[Immanuel Can]

...what would I be afraid to suggest?

You're going to have to tell me. I have no idea what you're ashamed of.

No idea what you're referring to or how it relates. Another question, would anyone at this point know what you're talking about!

Fine. If you're confused, you're confused. I can explain it: I can't understand it for you.

[Immanuel Can]

Nope. That wasn't interesting.

Too bad

Nope.

[Nick_A]

Before defining evil, a person must first define the good. Genesis 1

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Light is the good. So once a person understands what "light" is, evil will be what prevents recognition of the light.