AJ wrote: First, I do not profess to have all my ideas worked out.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 26, 2022 4:12 pm
Yep. That's for certain. Or even your basic definition of your most essential term for your thesis.
You will jump at any opportunity to apply some spurious label and I get it of course. But the truth about why my viewpoints and perspectives are up in the air and shifting are various. Is the fact that I do not, or cannot
yet, concretize my viewpoints into some sort of *program* an error? (one might ask). Or is my hesitancy to do so because of some 'virtue'? Note that a post or two up Uwot referred to my status as a 'contemptible human person' because, obviously, for some of my political and social views. What
he means I can only guess. But I know enough of his own position to venture a reasonable guess. And he is right (if my guess is right): my present developing viewpoints should inspire contempt from someone with his. These polarities are only increasing.
The point? There are ideological battles forming. And these battles have to do with 'consequential ideas'. I refrain from taking absolutely concretized stances because of ideological uncertainty. There are so many viewpoints and perspectives that have to be examined with more care. And all of this takes time. A great deal of time.
I am uncertain what "your basic definition of your most essential term for your thesis" refers to. You mean a 'definition of Christian? Here I think you are wrong. I think I have a pretty clear and definitely an ample enough understanding of what comprises the Christian belief-system. But the issue that arises between you and I (and in a more important and wider sense between idea-sets that operate today in far wider circles) has to do with the fact that I reject your messianism. The reason this is particularly a difficult area is because of my own links with Judaism. As it turns out Judeo-Christianity is now a modern amalgam. It has morphed in our present into something social and political. Your branch of Christianity is in a bizarre way a form of Judaism. Your Christianity is Zionism. And Zionism is a problematic political issue in our present.
Many pages back now I mentioned Sizer's
Christian Zionism -- Roadmap to Armageddon. Since I assert that you have a diseased mind and cannot reason properly, because your mental processes are contaminated by religious fanaticism, I have to think about and arrive at proper decisions about whether the larger Christian-Zionist movement is, for similar reasons, a sickness and a danger. This involves a 'turn' against, say, my own heritage (or a part of it anyway) and simultaneously it involves examining the perverse relationship between modern Judaism and Christian Zionism in which Judaism (certain active political agents) is the pimp and Christianity the prostitute.
All of this having to do directly, and not abstractly, with events occurring in our present. These have nothing to do, or extremely little, with Christian ethics.
Your entire strange version of Christianity hinges on
one thing. You have stated it so many times. It is a decision to surrender oneself to what you refer to as Jesus Christ as if Jesus Christ is a metaphysical locality in the space you imagine Jesus Christ as existing. According to you an individual does this and, presto-chango, one is taken into the fold of a salvific God and 'saved'. But the actual facts of the matter is that there are millions of people who state the same thing, and say they have done the same thing, and yet they are simply controlled actors in the political, social and economic world that is our world. And many millions of them, unconsciously, have been subsumed into larger social, political and economic currents such that their 'Christian ethical stance' has very little meaning.
So, one must reject all of this as mass social control and mass-religion as being a part of this while still holding to the possibility that someone could practice a sincere and honest form of the religion (that would involve building or rebuilding the self along new ethical lines).
I do not *believe in* that surrender of self. I do not believe in a God (or God's emissary) that would ask for such a thing. To become a slave. To under a relationship where you give yourself over to a superior power. So my entire idea of what religiosity means (and this was catalyzed over the last few months here) necessarily shifted. These are not trivial questions and issues. They cannot be resolved from one day to the next.
And all of this hinges into other things that were already mentioned (but not developed). That the Indo-Europeans when they were encountered by Christianity necessarily modified certain core tenets of the religion. But that also implies, or predicts let's say, eventually throwing off that yoke -- and then what?
This is the primary moral problem. A man has to make choices for his won reasons and according to his own conscience, not because of surrender to an external power.
