Christianity

[Dontaskme]

Augustine defined evil as absence of good. If evil is absence of good then good is the default i.e. God.

Only within the dream of conceptual separation.

God is everything and nothing at all.

[attofishpi]

Christianity is a religion which introduced the notion that there was and is a leader and rescuer who shows the proper ethical system to us.

Yes. It's quite a conundrum to exist (what will?) and yet be faced with the EVIL of God itself where we must be rescued from ITS punishment by believing in Christ!

To define God as love and not comprehend the other side of it as evil is short of sight.

Augustine defined evil as absence of good. If evil is absence of good then good is the default i.e. God.

Augistine might be right on that, but what you state does not then follow, ergo, one could not clip the roses with it. If evil is absence of good, then God could still be a **** of both persuasions.

[Belinda]

Yes. It's quite a conundrum to exist (what will?) and yet be faced with the EVIL of God itself where we must be rescued from ITS punishment by believing in Christ!

To define God as love and not comprehend the other side of it as evil is short of sight.

Augustine defined evil as absence of good. If evil is absence of good then good is the default i.e. God.

Augistine might be right on that, but what you state does not then follow, ergo, one could not clip the roses with it. If evil is absence of good, then God could still be a **** of both persuasions.

Not if God is defined as good personified. In order to clip the roses with that theory, Jesus of Nazareth is one of the holy prophets who have been acclaimed as receivers and/or interpreters of God/good.

[attofishpi]

Augustine defined evil as absence of good. If evil is absence of good then good is the default i.e. God.

Augistine might be right on that, but what you state does not then follow, ergo, one could not clip the roses with it. If evil is absence of good, then God could still be a **** of both persuasions.

Not if God is defined as good personified.

Sure, but the Old Testament clearly negates that.

In order to clip the roses with that theory,

I was just mucking about with non-sequitur. (and the fact that the rose is symbolic)

Jesus of Nazareth is one of the holy prophets who have been acclaimed as receivers and/or interpreters of God/good.

Interesting though (slightly\sort of) that this conversation came up, since something rather profound happened over the past 48 hrs re good ol' Christ and me. I'd be happy to share a small portion if you are interested - pm or email.

[Belinda]

Augistine might be right on that, but what you state does not then follow, ergo, one could not clip the roses with it. If evil is absence of good, then God could still be a **** of both persuasions.

Not if God is defined as good personified.

Sure, but the Old Testament clearly negates that.

In order to clip the roses with that theory,

I was just mucking about with non-sequitur. (and the fact that the rose is symbolic)

Jesus of Nazareth is one of the holy prophets who have been acclaimed as receivers and/or interpreters of God/good.

Interesting though (slightly\sort of) that this conversation came up, since something rather profound happened over the past 48 hrs re good ol' Christ and me. I'd be happy to share a small portion if you are interested - pm or email.

Re "clip the roses". It was a good metaphor to stand in for 'pragmatically'. I fully understand why you'd not want to publish some important personal experience to a forum . I am flattered you trust me and I will not disrespect your experience or how you express it, but hold your horses! Sometimes it's better to keep some experiences private. Don't throw pearls before swine.( I don't eat pigs I like them.) PM okay if you decide.

The Bible seems and largely is disconnected in the ideas of God therein. However God , like other ideas, evolves . The evolution of God has been written up by scholars. The Old Testament prophets revolutionised the status of Jahweh so He became not tribal but universal in His ethics. Jesus was more like the prophets' God than the old tribal Jahweh.

[Dubious]

I gather that in your rather reduced and simplified version of things that Nietzsche is somehow responsible for the Nazi regime

In a way, yes.

Nietzsche is not responsible for positively advocating Nazism itself. That's too simplistic a way to tell the story of what he did. What he did instead was this: he set out to destroy the only meaningful basis of resistance to things like Nazism. And to the extent that he succeeded in doing that, he certainly raised and fed the dragon. His amoralism could have precipitated different attrocities, and I would argue it did that too. But in the case of the Nazis, they certainly found his terms, like ubermensch, and his contempt for Jews, women and those others he saw as inferior, or his idea of a superior morality that vacates all conventional morality, as fertile matter for creating their own disasters. They used him, but used him well for their purposes.

We don't know if Nietzsche would have complained about that. Plausible, since he didn't like Nazis, apparently. However, what Nietzsche did was so serviceable to them that we should not take his objections seriously, even if they came. From him and from Heidegger, they derived all the intellectual rationalizations they would ever need. He knocked all the walls flat; and he left nothing that could stand against Nazi attrocities when they arose to make use of him.

That he got what he may not have wanted is his own darn fault. That's what one gets for talking like a madman.

If this isn't a load of sh..than nothing qualifies. Btw, your statement "didn't like Nazis apparently" is a bit out of chronology, since Nazis didn't exist during Nietzsche's life time. To like or not to like is not an option when no one could know what will happen.

Your intentionally malicious views on Nietzsche never cease repeating the same canards incessantly.

I don't know how many times you were informed that Nietzsche was anti-anti-Semitic. That's proven in his own words and just about any worthwhile biography or article written about him.

He even despised his sister for being anti-Semitic!

But still you keep harping the same lies forever ready to cast ad hominems against someone who's dead through pure malice for having proclaimed the demise in the long influence of Christian belief. There was really nothing new in this at the time, only the way Nietzsche expressed it.

Is this your superior biblical morality, so full of hate and lies against someone who wasn't even close to responsible for all the catastrophes that took place?

What you know of Nietzsche is nil if you can't even acknowledge the simple fact of what has long been known and established...that he hated Jew haters.

Even Hitler, when asked by Leni Riefenstahl during filming of The Triumph of the Will, if he liked to read Nietzsche replied...
No, I can't really do much with Nietzsche...he is not my guide.

Re your statement, from him and from Heidegger, they derived all the intellectual rationalizations they would ever need; The intellectual basis for National Socialism was more or less Alfred Rosenberg's The myth of the Twentieth Century. Regardless, what was extracted from Nietzsche by the Nazis were mostly slogans because they were the easiest to comprehend and use in a propagandistic manner.

I know you want no part of the following, of which there is so much more, I'll simply quote the last line...

Always make sure you get the full story before you make any decisions, philosophically speaking. ...or at least try to.

But if you did, you wouldn't have the great pleasure of hating Nietzsche as much as you do. Even if I were religious, I'd despise anyone for making theistic morality appear as if it were a contradiction.

https://bigthink.com/thinking/how-the-n ... o-anybody/

...another quote and comment...

The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.(The Antichrist, Sec. 39)
For all of his objections to Christianity, and he had many, Nietzsche often spoke highly of Jesus. Nietzsche blamed most of what he disliked in Christianity on St. Paul, while praising Christ for creating his own moral evaluations, a step towards the Ubermensch.

What Rudolf Steiner said of Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche applies in full measure to you as well!

He went so far as to write that she, “lacks any sense for fine, and even for crude, logical distinctions; her thinking is void of even the least logical consistency; and she lacks any sense of objectivity.”

If you had anything in common with the Nietzsche name it would be with that of his sister.

[Immanuel Can]

How do you know I never read the bible...

Because you know squat about it.

...how would you know that I know squat about it?

Because you dismiss Christianity so cavalierly. And it never occurs to you how many people of great intellect, over thousands of years, have devoted themselves to understanding a message you dismiss with a wave of your hand. It's as if you don't even understand the challenge, let alone see the difficulties for your position.

A person who does that knows nothing, and has only prejudice to go on. That's the obvious explanation.

You also accused Nietzsche of knowing squat about the bible compared to whom, with his history of having a father who was a very devout Lutheran pastor

Well, much could be said about that. One thing is that not all putative "pastors" are, and Kierkegaard had plenty to say about the failings of the Lutheran clergy. But even among those that are at least somewhat genuine, it has zero effect on how much attention their sons pay to what they say. Your father might be a dentist, a bridge builder or a policeman...it doesn't make you one.

So let Nietzsche stand or fall on what he, personally says about Judaism and Christianity. That's the real indicator. And even a basic reading shows that what he says is typically ignorant, dismissive and shallow. But in order to know how superficial Nietzsche's understanding really was, you'd actually have to have read the Bible yourself. That's the only way you could tell whether he "gets it" or not.

You don't know. You haven't, obviously.

So there's your proof.

[Immanuel Can]

You said...

No, not my theory...we know what I think. What I want is your alternate theory.

Or is it the case that you would rather reject what both the Bible and Evolutionism suppose to be the case, and would rather know nothing than have to agree with both?

If you have no alternate theory, that means you'd rather know nothing. That's kind of desperate, B., if you don't mind me saying.

Below I have copied and pasted my theory from my post of May 12 at 9.24 AM.

That's not "your theory," at all. You're avoiding answering, or having trouble grasping the question: I don't know which.

It does not give an account of how human beings can evolve as a group without relying on some mutation by way of reproduction. And if they can't, then you're stuck having to conclude there was an original mating pair.

But I'm still waiting to hear your Evolutionary account. God ahead.

[Immanuel Can]

Btw, your statement "didn't like Nazis apparently" is a bit out of chronology,

All it means is that he was not, himself, a National Socialist. But no one doubts that he equipped the National Socialists with a nice stock of concepts and arguments that they were able to use.

I don't know how many times you were informed that Nietzsche was anti-anti-Semitic. That's proven in his own words and just about any worthwhile biography or article written about him.

“This is precisely why the Jews are the most disastrous people in world history: they have left such a falsified humanity in their wake that even today Christians can think of themselves as anti-Jewish without understanding that they are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

Even Hitler, when asked by Leni Riefenstahl during filming of The Triumph of the Will, if he liked to read Nietzsche replied...
No, I can't really do much with Nietzsche...he is not my guide.

"Just as American politicians like to reference the ideas of dead American heroes like Washington and Jefferson, the Nazis sought great Germans to reference when justifying their new regime. Nietzsche, with the tweaks made to his philosophy by his sister, became the primary thinker for those Nazis looking to justify their beliefs with philosophy."

German universities taught Nietzsche as part of courses on the new order, references to soldiers being the Ubermensch were common, and the will to power was adopted by the Nazis as a key psychological insight. The philosopher Alfred Baeumler claimed Nietzsche had prophesied the rise of Hitler and fascism in Germany."-- Thinking magazine: from the same article you quoted.

[Belinda]

Augustine defined evil as absence of good. If evil is absence of good then good is the default i.e. God.

Only within the dream of conceptual separation.

God is everything and nothing at all.

Nothing is when God is totally absent.

[Belinda]

No, not my theory...we know what I think. What I want is your alternate theory.

Or is it the case that you would rather reject what both the Bible and Evolutionism suppose to be the case, and would rather know nothing than have to agree with both?

If you have no alternate theory, that means you'd rather know nothing. That's kind of desperate, B., if you don't mind me saying.

Below I have copied and pasted my theory from my post of May 12 at 9.24 AM.

That's not "your theory," at all. You're avoiding answering, or having trouble grasping the question: I don't know which.

It does not give an account of how human beings can evolve as a group without relying on some mutation by way of reproduction. And if they can't, then you're stuck having to conclude there was an original mating pair.

But I'm still waiting to hear your Evolutionary account. God ahead.

But biology, unlike Genesis, is not concerned with ethics. The human condition, with which Genesis deals, is a lot more complicated than evolution by natural selection.

[Alexis Jacobi]

AJ: And indeed as everyone knows, and as you also state, Catholicism is, truthfully, a blending of many different strains of tradition.

Does everyone know that? I believe you do, and I know I do. I wonder if the majority of Catholics, raised as they are to believe that the tradition of their group recedes all the way back to Peter, would even imagine how much syncretism has gone on. And as for secularists, I think most of them view "Christianity" from the outside, and are baffled by it. They find it convenient to conflate the whole confusing mass into one entity, and dub it "the Christian tradition," or some other such vague collective term, and then make generalizations about what the whole mass allegedly "did," in a given historical period, rather than to face the complexities involved in understanding what Christianity actually is.

I do not regard it as a defect that early Christianity incorporated into itself different traditions. As I have said a few times those early centuries were made up of 'a confusion of peoples' and also a confusion of ideas and conceptions. I have referred to an outlook that I picked up from Waldo Frank: that to understand *our traditions* (what made Europe and what it was constructed from) we need to consider Judea, Greece, Rome and Alexandria -- Alexandria being a culture and idea melting pot. Everything since is far more 'Alexandria' since everywhere is a melting pot.

In your case, because you attempt to define a *pure* Christian fundamentalism, you exclude, in my view nearly literally, everything that Christianity actually was and is and try to define a 'chemically pure version' which, in your case, you define as a 'Non-denominational Christianity'. When asked Who in history actually lived out of this perspective-interpretation? you offer a few references, but this has always seemed weak to me. For this reason I define you as a Modern -- indeed an Ultra-Modern -- who has staked out a revisionist position within a revised Christian interpretation. And that has become your *fort*.

From your position within your Fort you can, and you do, take on all comers. And the key to understanding the ground you have staked out is to examine that you assert yourself, and declare about yourself, that you are (or the people you associate with, or some ideal Christian) are the only True Christians in all history. And this staked-out position enables you to judge all of Christian history, and all of Christian Europe, as essentially non-Christian or contaminated Christian.

And the worldpicture that you seem to hold to is a very very strict and very circumscribed enthusiastic Christian religious posture. What you say thus reduces to this: "Either you submit in an internal act to the concept-picture I have of Jesus Christ and as a result of this a) allow God to reconstruct you (this involves an odd manoeuvre of setting your self and your own conscious will aside to a large degree since Man cannot guide himself because Man is fundamentally corrupt) and b) allow God to bequeath the state of *being saved* that I refer to; or you do not."

For those who do not, according to the logic of the zealous binary proposition, there can be no 'true rebuilding', no 'rebirth' in the spiritual sense referred to in the Gospels, and any who live outside of the realm you define are 'the lost' and the 'alienated'. You use a term like 'eternal alienation' as a type of substitute for the traditional image of Christian hell. But you hold to the view that once in that after-life state one will be there eternally.

Your metaphysics, thusly revealed, are ultra-simplistic. You stick to a (very) strict Christian interpretation nevertheless.

So then, and this is the statement that must follow my encapsulation of 1) what you believe and 2) also what Christianity is based on, I must make some comments as to what seems true to me. But it is more than just *what seems true* it is also what is true when the logic of the Christian metaphysics is examined closely and thoughtfully and how this moves toward areas of absurdity.

And if we were to broach that conversation -- an examination of what appears to me to be right, in any case possible -- we would veer into territories that you could not go. Your will is tightly bound to your specific definitions and cannot be changed or modified.

AJ: ]However, there is definitely another level and a far higher level when one considers enthusiasts like CS Lewis, John Henry Newman and GK Chesterton.

IC: Such people have done much to damage the reputation of Christianity. However, Mr. Hinn is not mindful of the judgments pronounced against men like him in Scripture itself. He has put himself in very deadly danger, nor merely for his many frauds but for his constant false teaching. So I will thank you not to conflate Christians with the man you see on the screen. And you will do yourself a service if you do not.

These are people who did not hesitate to deal intellectually with the life of faith. They make much more commendable models that does Mr. Hinn. But all human beings are fallible, of course; and not every word they said was right, either. We all have to stay humble about these things when we consider we are trying to speak about God. But yes, they serve as at least approximate examples of the sort of reasonable Christianity I would condone.

You missed my point in my reference to Benny Hinn. I was making a reference to *enthusiastic religion* by taking the most extreme example I could imagine -- a total evangelical Christian lunatic who runs an entire 'show' which is also a big business. My point is that though the extreme end of this style of Evangelism is regarded by many Christians as being off the charts, nevertheless the phenomenon of Evangelism uses many of the same techniques which might be labeled as 'showmanship'. But there is another element: psychological and social manipulation. Do I condemn this? It is not really for me to condemn and yet it is for me to notice.

So what I can do is to refer, for example, to the Great Awakening in American history:

The Great Awakening was a religious revival that impacted the English colonies in America during the 1730s and 1740s. The movement came at a time when the idea of secular rationalism was being emphasized, and passion for religion had grown stale. Christian leaders often traveled from town to town, preaching about the gospel, emphasizing salvation from sins and promoting enthusiasm for Christianity. The result was a renewed dedication toward religion. Many historians believe the Great Awakening had a lasting impact on various Christian denominations and American culture at large.

There is a somewhat direct line between these religious revivals (the First and Second Great Awakening) and the crazy cults of California in the 60s and 70s. And there is definitely a line of causation between those Awakenings, the Burned Over District, and the establishment of Pentecostalism. And as you know, and as I have referred to through talks by Peter Berger, Pentecostalism is sweeping the world in a way that corresponds, in social, psychological and psychic intensity, to the spread of Islam.

Pentecostalism's effects, for those who care to examine the issue, have deeply affected culture in other, unlikely areas. The implications are rather strange and also amazing. (If you are wondering why Little Richard it is because he came out of a Pentecostal household and brings 'enthusiastic' energy to his music. It is the same fervent energy but applied in a different area or for different purposes.)

So, I get that you see yourself as a 'chemically-pure' and 'original' Christian who has returned to the real & true roots of Christianity, but what I point out is that there is no such thing, and in fact there can be no such thing, because the only true & original Christians were those who emerged from that time. But even then, even then, those who carried Christianity forward did so through the act of interpreting it. And we need look no further than St. Paul.

Shall I sum up what I am *getting at* with some words to tie it all together? Am I offering a 'program'? or trying to define the 'true & proper Christianity'?

What I am trying to point out, and the area that I work in, has more to do with understanding the Pictures that we work with -- worldpicture, our Weltanschauung, out of which and from which we 'conceive of the world' in which we live. If you say "Well, that is all well and good, but where do you stand morally and ethically (as well as metaphysically)?", I can only answer by saying I have done the best that I can do, and I am doing the best that I can do, within the existing perceptual structures that perceptual life have provided me with. I am simply a man within my context.

Salvation? From what to what? The proper and God-ordained position within a perceptual structure? Some ultimate view, hermeneutic and outlook for Life itself?

[Dontaskme]

Augustine defined evil as absence of good. If evil is absence of good then good is the default i.e. God.

Only within the dream of conceptual separation.

God is everything and nothing at all.

Nothing is when God is totally absent.

Nothing is absent

[Belinda]

Only within the dream of conceptual separation.

God is everything and nothing at all.

Nothing is when God is totally absent.

Nothing is absent

I agree .

[Dontaskme]

Nothing is when God is totally absent.

Nothing is absent

I agree .

You don’t lose it you return it. 🫡

I agree with you Belinda