Christianity

[iambiguous]

All I can do here of course is to appeal to others...

Yes, I imagine that's true.

Reduced to this! Again!! And without a scintilla of embarrassment!!!

And in a philosophy forum derived from a respectable philosophy magazine no less.

The Lord truly does work in mysterious ways.

[iambiguous]

IC...

Let's focus in just on this part:

Oh, and PS -- Even Dawkins and Hitchens admit there IS evidence for God. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHXXacBAm2A Going to watch that one?

Yeah, I watched it. And I was looking for two things:

1] demonstrable evidence that this God is the Christian God and not one of the other ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
2] the sort of proof that would [again] be on par with proof that the Pope does in fact reside in the Vatican

In that regard, you tell me.

Not to mention the fact that this "finely tuned Goldilocks effect" brought into existence here on planet Earth earthquakes, tsunamis, super-volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the extinction events brought on by asteroids and comets and other "Heavenly bodies". Not to mention as well the AIDS and Covid 19 viruses, the bubonic plaque and hundreds and hundreds of terrible health afflictions.

[Immanuel Can]

All I can do here of course is to appeal to others...

Yes, I imagine that's true.

Reduced to this! Again!! And without a scintilla of embarrassment!!!

Hey, you said it.

I just agreed with you.

[Immanuel Can]

IC...
Let's focus in just on this part:

Let's not.

I've seen how you treat every evidence you get. I'm no longer confident in your ability -- or perhaps your willingness -- to track a line of thought.

I shall let you be whatever it is you have determined to be.

[Nick_A]

Nick_A asked: " Is God for you strictly a personal God outside of Man or do you see our source as within us and something we can awaken to?".

This question above poses not two, but three options.

Well, let's consider those three options, then.

1. Personal God outside of Man.

Man believes in God as objectively real, and acts accordingly. Logic, reason, evidence and science become important components of the investigation into His nature and identity, as His existence is empirical. And revelation becomes relevant as well, should God have decided to do anything to communicate His existence.

2. Source as within us.

Well, each of us already knows he/she is not God. We're contingent beings, beings with a birth and a death, and as such cannot be God. Given this view, there is no objective God, salvation, afterlife, or grounds for morality, even if some of us persist in behaving in "moral" ways out of habit or choice. Subjectivism is absolute. Truth cannot be located because of differences in subjectivity. Reality no longer decides anything.

3. Something we can awaken to.

Is both delusional (having no reference to external reality) and entirely dependent on personal emotion or interior experience. There is no common truth about God. Logic, evidence, reason and science are offline on the whole question, because they also are external and factual; and instead, whatever mental impression a private individual has becomes decisive of everything. Truth is not a shared property: one human sees things differently from another, and since none have any objective reference to reality anyway, every person is locked into a private, subjective imagining of things, without rules, guidance or basis of doubting anything. There is no critical thinking, no falsification of impressions, and no means of arbitration between competing "visions."

So we could valorize numbers 2 and 3, as you have done, B. But only at the cost of hiding their rather considerable drawbacks.

You seem to have forgotten the whole purpose of Jesus' mission which is to enable man to experience rebirth and metanoia. Before this man is said to be asleep. What quality of understanding do sleeping people have? Man must awaken.

KJV
Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

[Immanuel Can]

You seem to have forgotten the whole purpose of Jesus' mission

Not a bit.

Man must awaken.

Not enough. One can see the light, then turn away.

He needs a deeper transformation: he must be "born again." (John 3)

[Nick_A]

You seem to have forgotten the whole purpose of Jesus' mission

Not a bit.

Man must awaken.

Not enough. One can see the light, then turn away.

He needs a deeper transformation: he must be "born again." (John 3)

True, but the reality is that people argue Christianity without being born again or even having felt what this means. What sense is that?

[Immanuel Can]

You seem to have forgotten the whole purpose of Jesus' mission

Not a bit.

Man must awaken.

Not enough. One can see the light, then turn away.

He needs a deeper transformation: he must be "born again." (John 3)

True, but the reality is that people argue Christianity without being born again or even having felt what this means. What sense is that?

In any ideology, there are those who really are believers in it, and there are those that are mere "hangers on," who, for one reason or another, wish to be associated with it or believe themselves to be in it. For some, it's about social respectability; for others, family or cultural tradition; for others, existential comfort; for others, an opportunity for status or a release for instinctive dogmatism...and so on. None of that has anything to do with being "born again," of course.

This is true of every creed, be it religious, political or other ideological. It's certainly true of Atheism and Materialism. After all, how many of them claim to believe their Atheism or their Materialism, and yet continue to insist and to live as if morality or meaning are real, even though their creed makes that logically impossible? Plenty, I would say.

So it's not "sense"; it's just human nature. The existence of hangers-on isn't a serious observation about any belief.

[Nick_A]

Not a bit.


Not enough. One can see the light, then turn away.

He needs a deeper transformation: he must be "born again." (John 3)

True, but the reality is that people argue Christianity without being born again or even having felt what this means. What sense is that?

In any ideology, there are those who really are believers in it, and there are those that are mere "hangers on," who, for one reason or another, wish to be associated with it or believe themselves to be in it. For some, it's about social respectability; for others, family or cultural tradition; for others, existential comfort; for others, an opportunity for status or a release for instinctive dogmatism...and so on. None of that has anything to do with being "born again," of course.

This is true of every creed, be it religious, political or other ideological. It's certainly true of Atheism and Materialism. After all, how many of them claim to believe their Atheism or their Materialism, and yet continue to insist and to live as if morality or meaning are real, even though their creed makes that logically impossible? Plenty, I would say.

So it's not "sense"; it's just human nature. The existence of hangers-on isn't a serious observation about any belief.

But being born again is not a belief. It is an experience. For example consider Luke 8:2

And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils,

Mary seems to have been an intelligent rebel and tried everything. Jesus cleaned her out and she discovered freedom and the inner direction leading to freedom for the first time. She experienced awakening. It is no wonder she followed him

[Immanuel Can]

But being born again is not a belief. It is an experience. For example consider Luke 8:2

That's still too little to say. It's not merely a belief, nor is it just an "experience" of a kind like other "experiences." It's a reality, a new relation, and a transformation.

It's a reconstitution of being, really. Nothing that was before is the same afterward.

[Dontaskme]

But being born again is a reality, a new relation, and a transformation.

It's a reconstitution of being, really. Nothing that was before is the same afterward.

Yeah yeah yeah, we get it IC...Before enlightenment(not-knowing you are alive) chop wood carry water. After enlightenment (knowing you are alive) chop wood carry water.

Same, but not the same...Changed, but nothing changes...we get it IC...

Enlightenment comes to us all eventually, you have an eternity in which to reach it...Now you are enlightened, go and live an ordinary life like everyone else, it really is ok to be human you know.

Just do what humans do, that's all you can be, yourself, it's pointless trying to be anything other than what you are, now and always now and will be forever.

Be yourself, the real fictional character, and do not live in Fear of causing yourself to become morally and ethically incompetent. To Err is human. Forgive yourself human ..for you know not what you do... until you do know what you do.

Repeat after me... .Before enlightenment(not-knowing you are alive) chop wood carry water. After enlightenment (knowing you are alive) chop wood carry water.

rinse and repeat....rinse and repeat....rinse and repeat....there is nothing extra ordinary in the ordinary...except ego.

But anything that makes your ''holy butt'' look bigger, then go for it, fart it out for England.



.

[Alexis Jacobi]

AJ: The idea of a 'world beyond' that is better and more real than this world, became untenable and indeed an unhealthy idea to hold to.

Well, that's Marx's old canard. But Marx was wildly wrong there. Quite the contrary: it's only the idea that the consequences of this world persist that makes sense of the present at all. I can easily prove that. And it's nearly a universal truism, as well, one of the few things that the Eastern and Western traditions tend to all agree on.

Your paragraph constitutes a typical misreading and a typical rephrasing and results in misunderstanding. The misunderstanding has implications and ramifications. And the fact that you can only see in terms of distortions and bad-faith interpretations is very relevant when we examine why it is that people have felt a need to abandon the sort of religious conventions, or in another way of putting it of thought-control, in which you seem so involved and invested.

Note that your defensive tack is to attach the label 'Marxist' to the notion that it is often unhealthy, and potentially neurotic, to organize one's life around the notion of a *world beyond* and one that is portrayed as being better, and more 'real', than the life we have here. The object of 'returning to this world' and indeed 'returning to the body' as the place where one's spirituality and religion are carried out has been, indeed, a major shift over the course of the last 150 years (more or less). To place or to replace emphasis on a world beyond (to the extreme that traditional Christianity has often done) does not mean that one would or must abandon all *after-world* ideas -- if you do think that way it shows, again, how binary is your thinking, that is to say the only way available to you to think and to see. If this is determined by Biblical narratives, and this seems to be the case, then all of that emphasis not only can be examined but must be examined by 'moral people'.

But to reduce it, maliciously, through employment of the term "Marxist", is a false-designation. Yet it is not impossible that some or many who took the route, which they felt as necessary and healthy, of refocusing the religious impetus on this-world concerns, may have been influenced by ideas and schools of thought that also influenced Marx.

So as per normal, and once again, your outrageous and apologetics-oriented statements, when examined fairly and carefully, show intellectual and I'd suggest obfuscation-leaning tendencies. You cannot be relied on to be a responsible party to a fair and up-front conversation on these important topic. Why? It is as I have said: religious fanaticism. The reason this critique of you is important (and is distinct from ad hominem -- the pet-term you use to avoid poignancy of observation -- is because these fanatical trends in Christianity quash the sort of direct inquiry we actually need. So when you show these traits so strongly you end up alienating people who simply cannot go along with you because they do not want to be associated with religious fanaticism.

AK: I am not advocating for a 'secular self'. I am speaking of the ways that the concept of divinity changed.

IC: What does "secular" mean, if not "devoid of reference to divinity"? If it has another implication, can you say what you think it is?

Again note how the only intellectual mode you have available to you is a binary one! If I refer to 'the ways that the concept of divinity changes' you can only see this as resulting in secularism. One can indeed be very spiritual, and also very religious, and yet do so outside of a specific and highly administered and controlled religious environment (such as an organized church).

The fact of the matter is that in the early years of the 20th century this is precisely what did happen. The established churches began to be perceived as too restrictive and to doctrinaire. The social context of these religions and the hierarchies of men that maintained them were questioned. Now, I suppose you could blurt out that this was because of *Marx* but that would be a misrepresentation of the real facts. For good and for evil (or for good and for bad) the breaking of connection with authority because necessary. These are neutral facts. And people did begin to examine other religious modes (say by turning to the East) as well as by examining the pagan traditions and also esoteric traditions that operated alongside established religion, specifically Christianity. As an example I would mention AE White's The Hidden Church of the Holy Grail: Its Legends and Symbolism Considered in Their Affinity with Certain Mysteries of Initiation and Other Traces of a Secret Tradition in Christian Times. The title itself says a great deal. The implication is that there is a 'visible Church' and another church that operates, say, in concealed form. The idea is both concrete and historically verifiable and is at the same time an assertion with a psychological and mystic import: that such a hidden church should exist (because one needs other modes out of which to live more fully).

To imply that by turning away from organized and socially acceptable (and managed) spiritual ideas results no longer being able to conceive of divinity simply does not follow. In the early 20th century dozens if not hundreds of people ventured into new and different directions but these did not preclude a notion of the divine nor the sacred.

If it has another implication, can you say what you think it is?

It is implied in all that I have just written. The fact of the matter is that these new paths, the paths set forth and followed in the time-period referenced, had a tremendous influence on Christianity itself (some branches of it). I noticed this influence in the Christian psychology movement. But so too has Catholicism and many religious been influenced by Jungian ideas and practices and the ways of incorporating more internal and personal levels of relationship within a lived religious understanding. The notion of what 'God' is and how God communicates changed quite substantially.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Yes: the Bible talks about this: "All of us, like sheep, have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way..." (Isaiah 53:6)

It says also, "There is a way which seems right to a person, but its end is the way of death." (Prov. 14:23)

As for Nietzsche, you can either believe him or not, depending on your inclination. He gives you no more than that to go on: he just declares, "God is dead," then does absolutely nothing to prove it. He offers no evidence, no logical syllogisms, no historical certification, or anything like that. He doesn't even try, because of his prior assumption that "God" is just a concept, not a reality. It's just another narrative, another way of "telling the story," but utterly devoid of justification. Nietzsche's just taking his own assumptions for granted, and counting on the fact that you will too, if he doesn't expose them.

To deal with the way you think and see requires one after another of dismantling of the ideas that dominate you.

First, one would have to establish what Isaiah was actually referring to when he spoke of 'turning his own way'. It cannot function as a universal statement for everyone, or anyone, who has turned away from following or even respecting authority. But this is how you are using it. What you mean of course is that you believe that people in our culture, today, have turned away from church or religious authority and have veered into questionable directions. This is a view that I share since I am concerned with social and cultural decadence and 'liberal rot'.

But your implication is also that some church, or established religious structures, are themselves *sound* and should be followed as legitimate authorities. But this is false. Or it is false from the perspective of people like me perhaps, and others who participate on this thread, who find a great deal that is corrupt within the Christian establishment. So if that is true, and it is true (true as rain) it becomes imperative to 'turn to his own way' and to seek in different ways.

It is Proverbs 14:12 that you meant to refer to. Your quote becomes problematic because what you actually mean is that your particular way of understanding Christianity and Christian religiousness -- the reference is essentially to yourself and what you think, say and believe -- is the only way and therefore if one takes issue with you, one is taking issue with *the Bible* and with truth itself.

This is how your entire argument functions. So the way this should be translated is that whoever offers a different, or an alternative view to that which you hold is on the path of death.

There is no doubt, in my mind at least, that Nietzsche the man is highly problematic. That is to say that what was thought, and what was realized, in the age that produced Nietzsche is intensely problematic and difficult to understand. It is very hard to decide, ultimately, where one stands in relation to his declaration that God had died (and we killed him). But so much of this is evident, obviously, in this on-going conversation. You are speaking to people who tell you, time and again, that the god-concept that animates you, and into which you are indoctrinated, has for them died -- become untenable and also unbelievable. You condemn them, by referring to condemnatory Bible quotes, for what is a honest and fair confession of where they stand intellectually and spiritually.

Thus, you see, you really have so little positive function and next to zero positive effect. You obtain the opposite of what you pretend to seek! You have no understanding of what Nietzsche actually meant, and so you have no way to speak to him and, as well, to those who have been extruded from similar intellectual and (honest) thought processes. I do not mean to counter-condemn you-singular but rather to reveal that within established Christianity *they* have lost the means to reach the audience that has veered away from the Christian foundation.

My position is curious: I respect on some level the content that you value and refer to (the Bible and Christian philosophy generally and the spiritual processes to which it refers) and at the same time I see your myriad faults -- as an apologist who achieves the opposite of what you say you desire. I am forced to 'explain' Nietzsche, and to defend his ideas and views, while simultaneously suggesting that he be examined as critically as anyone. Yet I am aware too that those who read him and were affected by him set out in directions that opposed 'established hierarchies' and this was both positive and also very negative. At the same time I am forced, through genuine respect, to defend Christian theology, as well as the inner processes to which Christianity refers, while carefully avoiding overy association with your (distorted) views.

It's a difficult row to hoe.

He doesn't even try, because of his prior assumption that "God" is just a concept, not a reality.

You stumble over this one, and mightily. God is most certainly a *concept* that is held in the mind of men. And that 'concept' was supported by myriad 'stories' which could no longer be believed in! The stories collapsed, and along with the stories the ideas that the stories portrayed or encased.

If you are going to *explain* God you are going to have to do so all over again to an audience that no longer is susceptible to the power, or the veracity let's say, of the Old Stories. This is the point where you have become useless. You are wedded even to the most outrageous stories (of the Bible) and you 'believe them' although you have bizarre mental gymnastics through which this seems 'rational' to you. And you assert that you are as rational as Aristotle! and those who can't go along with you are irrational and obstinate.

It is a curious problem that is faced when you (plural really) are seen, understood and faced.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Is God for you strictly a personal God outside of Man or do you see our source as within us and something we can awaken to?

Well, I have been influenced (likely obviously) by CG Jung's notion of the 'psyche'. I admit that Jung is a religious-minded man who dressed up his 'scientific' and empirical clinical psychological ideas so to appear 'respectable' but also intellectually tenable to Moderns. This is a topic all to itself.

But our own psyche -- our own self, our own perceptual instrument -- is all that we have to work with in the ultimate instance. So, the projection of God onto the 'outside' world tends to fail. Whatever god that made and rules that world is quite different from the god that is encountered on an inner plane. There is a contradiction here that is difficult to bridge.

You describe how you conceive a spiritual and religious path. And the terms you use are Christian -- Christian mysticism to be more precise. Your views and your own practice are non-conventional and are part of (say) hidden traditions that are associated with mystical schools of Christianity. And these involve work with the psyche (as does the work of, say, a monk or a renunciant). I regard this as entirely valid of course and as 'real' as anything else.

But I am defining what is 'real' differently. I regard as very real, hyper-real in fact, all the productions of man's psyche! These come to us, or flow though us, and affect the world in dramatic ways. If we do not see and understand our 'psyche' and what it does, we totally miss the point of our anthropology (theory of man). We are creatures of our psyches.

Clearly, we can (and should) awaken to our inner planes and to our self. Unfortunately, we face obstacles because exterior religion is under such assault. It produces a divided condition.

So we need to examine those who really are *faithless* (take Promethean and numerous others as an example who 'exemplify' our present condition) and see how their faithlessness (genuine and honest) in external structures and managed concepts, leads to a separation from something within their own selves. Take Iambiguous as a prime example. He says *I want to believe!* that what Christianity refers to is 'true' and 'real' but he cannot find the external evidence, and so abandons the entire pursuit. Taken to an extreme this results in all sorts of negative outcomes (this is my own view).

But this is the *condition* in which we find ourselves. It is very hard to bridge it.

[Immanuel Can]

AJ: The idea of a 'world beyond' that is better and more real than this world, became untenable and indeed an unhealthy idea to hold to.

Well, that's Marx's old canard. But Marx was wildly wrong there. Quite the contrary: it's only the idea that the consequences of this world persist that makes sense of the present at all. I can easily prove that. And it's nearly a universal truism, as well, one of the few things that the Eastern and Western traditions tend to all agree on.

Your paragraph constitutes a typical misreading...

Heh. Nope.

That's exactly what Marx meant when he called "religion" "the opium of the masses." Opium's a soporific, a sleeping drug. He thought that Judaism and Christianity would prevent the Revolution, by convincing the oppressed masses to accept their lot here, in lieu of a better one later.

Note that your defensive tack is to attach the label 'Marxist' to the notion that it is often unhealthy, and potentially neurotic, to organize one's life around the notion of a *world beyond* and one that is portrayed as being better, and more 'real', than the life we have here.

But to reduce it, maliciously, through employment of the term "Marxist", is a false-designation.

Hogwash.

Marx said it. It's on him.

AK: I am not advocating for a 'secular self'. I am speaking of the ways that the concept of divinity changed.

IC: What does "secular" mean, if not "devoid of reference to divinity"? If it has another implication, can you say what you think it is?

Again note how the only intellectual mode you have available to you is a binary one!

Ad hominem nonsense. Give it up: I'm not buying it.

One can indeed be very spiritual, and also very religious,

So you think "secular" means "very religious in 'spiritual' ways"?

Nobody but you thinks that's what it means. Oxford says it means, "denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis."

The fact of the matter is that in the early years of the 20th century this is precisely what did happen. The established churches began to be perceived as too restrictive and to doctrinaire.

Only because they were.

But so what? Good riddance. What was quite clear is that faith itself was not disappearing; it had just departed the institutionalized "churches," where it had no place being at all in the first place.

To imply that by turning away from organized and socially acceptable (and managed) spiritual ideas results no longer being able to conceive of divinity simply does not follow.

Of course secular people know there's a God...the Bible explicitly says they do.

Why do you imply I said things I never said, or arguments I never made, like this one? Straw man?

I think I'm seeing why you like ad hominems. Projection. We tend to think our motives are the same motives others are having. But up to now, I've assumed you've been speaking in good faith; and up to now, you've been accusing me of all kinds of motives you think I would probably have (if I were you) but which I simply don't have.

I've been puzzled by this, up to now; I think I'm getting the picture now.